The diagrams of Alexander Burnett Hector's Expanded Colour Music

The objective of Sydney-based chemist Alexander Burnett Hector was to demonstrate the “correlation of the sciences” with colour music instruments. He began in 1908 with modified organ and piano keyboards that would activate coloured lights when playing musical notes and, by the 1920s, he had begun exploring the therapeutic possibilities of his colour music and adding kinetic and hydraulic components to his increasingly elaborate displays. These approaches were expanding colour music beyond working with just light and sound by incorporating additional energies like kinetic movement, air and water pressure, along with proposals about the positive affect on the wellbeing of his audience. While these instruments produced a captivating experience that was discussed widely in the media, when looking at Hector’s archive it is clear to see the inadequacies of technology as a way of demonstrating the full spectrum of energetic phenomena that he wished to include in his correlation of the sciences. Where these energies come together in chorus are his diagrams used to illustrate talks and lectures. This paper will discuss two of these diagrams and the sprawling multivalent nature of energies they illustrated including radiation, electromagnetism (within and outside the visible and audible spectrum), material interactions such as with gases and pigments, all of these reacting, transducing, transmuting in relation to each other, revealing the scale of Hector’s ambition to develop a universal theory that would bring together all energetic phenomena under one: vibration.