GLOSSARY +++ VISUAL MUSIC HISTORY**

Newton's color-music circle

Newton's division of the spectrum into seven colors matched to the seven notes of a scale, the founding analogy of color music.

In Opticks (1704), Newton divided the spectrum into seven bands, red through violet, and matched their proportions to the intervals of a musical scale, arranging both around a circle. Why seven colors? Largely because the scale had seven notes; orange and indigo owe their canonical status to the analogy.

The gesture founded three centuries of color-music speculation. Castel built on it within decades, and key-color charts from Rimington to Scriabin descend from its central move: mapping the octave onto the spectrum.

Physics eventually declined the metaphor (light doubles in frequency across one octave of the spectrum, nothing like sound’s ten), but as art-historical DNA the circle is everywhere the genre goes.