The connection between the color organ, the idea of painting, and the handmade film is clearest in the case of Syrian-born pianist Mary Elizabeth Hallock Greenewalt, likely the first woman to create her own color organ. Greenewalt invented and patented a number of projection devices, including a color organ called the Sarabet, named after her mother, Sara Tabet. The Sarabet, created in 1919, was designed to flood an auditorium with colored light, and was a remarkably inventive design. It consisted of a rheostat that controlled the reflections made by seven colored lights that played against a background of a single color, offering the possibility of 267 different shades. The instrument also made use of colored gels and reflectors as well as “glass tubes enclosing pools of mercury, carrying current, tilted by servo motors so that contact switches could rotate in and out of the electrified liquid.” The Sarabet was usually deployed in recitals alongside a pianist or orchestra, producing illuminated color fields to closely accompany the music.

Greenewalt also developed her own system of color notation, which included information about the brightness of the lights used, and believed that color music had curative properties. She dubbed her art Nourathar, a term derived from the Arabic words for “light” and “essence,” and she wrote that the Sarabet was an instrument for “light color play”—a similar appellation to the one used by the Bauhaus artists who experimented with moving color apparatus. In a lengthy memoir and guide to her instrument published in 1946, Nourathar: The Fine Art of Light-Color Playing, she proclaimed, “It is I who have conceived it, originated it, exploited it, developed it, and patented it.”