Elfriede Fischinger, Barbara Fischinger and Bill Moritz at a 1996 Lumograph performance at the Goethe Institute in Los Angeles.

The dream of creating a visual music comparable to auditory music found its fulfillment in animated abstract films by artists such as Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye and Norman McLaren; but long before them, many people built instruments, usually called "color organs," that would display modulated colored light in some kind of fluid fashion comparable to music.

Ancient Greek philosophers, like Aristotle and Pythagoras, speculated that there must be a correlation between the musical scale and the rainbow spectrum of hues. That idea fascinated several Renaissance artists including Leonardo da Vinci (who produced elaborate spectacles for court festivals), Athanasius Kircher (the popularizer of the "Laterna Magica" projection apparatus) and Archimboldo who (in addition to his eerie optical-illusion portraits composed of hundreds of small symbolic objects) produced entertainments for the Holy Roman Emperors in Prague.

The Jesuit, Father Louis Bertrand Castel, built an Ocular Harpsichord around 1730, which consisted of a 6-foot square frame above a normal harpsichord; the frame contained 60 small windows each with a different colored-glass pane and a small curtain attached by pullies to one specific key, so that each time that key would be struck, that curtain would lift briefly to show a flash of corresponding color. Enlightenment society was dazzled and fascinated by this invention, and flocked to his Paris studio for demonstrations. The German composer Telemann traveled to France to see it, composed some pieces to be played on the Ocular Harpsichord, and wrote a German-language book about it. But a second, improved model in 1754 used some 500 candles with reflecting mirrors to provide enough light for a larger audience, and must have been hot, smelly and awkward, with considerable chance of noise and malfunction between the pullies, curtains and candles. Besides, the grid color-for-note graph does not really correspond to how music is heard and felt: a symphony floats in the air, surrounding, and blending, with notes and phrases that swell up gradually from nothing, vibrate at intense volumes sometimes, and fade away smoothly. Nonetheless, Castel predicted that every home in Paris would one day have an Ocular Harpsichord for recreation, and dreamed of a factory making some 800,000 of them. But the clumsy technology did not really outlive the inventor himself, and no physical relic of it survives.

Fischinger's Lumograph was licensed for use in the 1960's sci-fi film, Time Travelers.

Despite technical limitations, many others experimented with clumsy machinery, including ones using colored liquids and daylight filtered through colored glass in a darkened tent. The Victorian era "philosophical toys" also had their color-music versions, including "chromatrope" slides for Magic Lanterns, in which layers of colored glass could be rotated by a hand-crank to produce moving mandalas, as well as abstract cycles for Zoetropes, Phenakisticopes and Praxinoscopes.

Electricity opened new possibilities for projected light, which were exploited by the British painter A. Wallace Rimington, whose Colour Organ formed the basis of the moving lights that accompanied the 1915 New York premiere of Scriabin's synaesthetic symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire, which had indications of precise colors in the score. Scriabin wanted everyone in the audience to wear white clothes so that the projected colors would be reflected on their bodies and thus possess the whole room.