Eli5: Why can’t smells or flavors be quantified and encoded in the same way colors and sound can (with RGB, frequency, etc)?

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It seems like any color or sound can be accurately encoded (and recreated) with just a few numbers. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case with smell or flavor. You can take a photo or sound recording and it’ll be a faithful recreation, but there’s no way to do that with smells or flavors. Is it a technology limitation or is there something fundamental to them that makes it harder to encode?

In: Physics

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Colors can’t actually be quantified with RGB. The RGB gamut does not cover all possible colors that are visible to humans. In fact, most colors that are purely a specific wavelength, do not have a RGB representation (since any color that corresponds to a wavelength needs that specific wavelength, rather than a combination of other wavelengths).

Also some music snobs understand the limitation of recording sound compared to experiencing the sound played live. I don’t, so I’m not gonna comment further on that.

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