Science: Luminaphone

It has been the diversion of certain modernist critics to write about music in terms of color, painting in the idiom of sound. They have pleasantly conjectured how Beethoven's Fifth Symphony would taste if the listener's auditory nerves were transferred to his lips; what sort of noise a banana would make did the observer devour it with his ears. Last week Harry Grindell-Matthews, British inventor of the "death-ray" (TIME, June 2 & 9, 1924, SCIENCE), demonstrated certain devices with which he had turned theoretical flippancies of the dilettanti into mechanical realism. It...