James Turrell's ''Drawings in the Sky'' is an artwork for the eye, not the ear. Installed as it is above the sometimes busy intersection of Grand Boulevard and Grandell Square in the city's Midtown area, the new light show that went on display last weekend is likely to generate a bit of noise from motorists who find their progress slowed by gawking viewers. But the resulting symphony of honking horns and screeching brakes would be just a side-effect, for better or worse. As for the laser beams themselves, anyone who looked at them and claimed actually to hear them would be regarded as something of a weirdo.

That would not always have been the case, however. Indeed, there was a time - quite a long time, in fact - when it seemed perfectly acceptable to make direct links between color and music. The dazzling green beams of ''Drawings in the Sky'' emanate from a church tower located diagonally across from Powell Hall, where earlier this month the St. Louis Symphony performed music by Rachmaninoff. In his memoirs, Rachmaninoff tells an interesting story about a conversation he had, sometime around the turn of the century, with his fellow Russian composers Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov.

''One of Scriabin's new discoveries concerned the relation between musical sounds and the spectrum of the sun,'' he reports. ''He was just working out the plan of a great symphonic composition in which there was to be a play of light and color. He said he would mark his score with a special system of light and color values.

''To my astonishment, Rimsky-Korsakov agreed in principle with Scriabin about this connection between musical keys and colors. I, who do not feel the similarity, contradicted him heatedly. The fact that Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin differed over the points of contact between the sound-and-color scale seemed to prove I was right.''

But all it proved was that Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov ''saw'' musical sounds, and ''heard'' colors, in their own ways. That stimuli of one sense organ triggered responses in another was something in which they adamantly believed. For them, the so-called synesthetic reaction was both constant and consistent.

According to the article on ''Color and Music'' in the wonderfully musty 1938 edition of the Oxford Companion to Music, the two composers had very specific color-music scales in mind. Here they are:

Why Rimsky-Korsakov was unable to ''see'' the pitch A-sharp remains a mystery. But he did claim to ''see'' all the other pitches. Like Scriabin's, his musical scale was chromatic in more ways than one. And different though they are in their details, the scales' occasional correspondences seem more remarkable than their contradictions.

In any case, regardless of what he told Rachmaninoff, Scriabin did not ''discover'' synesthesia. The alleged phenomenon did not become fashionable until Scriabin's time, but it had been around - in theory if not in actual practice - for quite a while before that.

Aristotle wrote about it as early as the fourth century B.C., and 500 years later it was one of the favorite topics of Ptolemy. Scholars in the Middle Ages, it seems, had more important things to think about, but it was taken up again - chiefly by Isaac Newton - in the late 1600s.

Newton's premise was that color and sound were, at the very least, analogous. He observed that both light waves and musical tones involved vibrations that could be measured and thus arranged in a scale-like pattern. Since there were seven pitches in the diatonic scale, he came up with a spectrum of seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, corresponding to the pitches of a B-flat major scale beginning on the second note. Later scientists argued that Newton's division of the spectrum was arbitrary, that there was an infinite number of shades in between these colors. But for Newton that was an insignificant detail. Like Rimsky-Korsakov, he would have seen the color green and heard, in his mind's ear, the pitch F.

The publication of Newton's ''Opticks'' in 1704 spurred the imaginations of musicians and inventors. In 1720, the French priest Louis Bertrand Castel constructed something he called the ''clavecin oculaire,'' a harpsichord that had a colored tape attached to each key; as the various keys were depressed, a beam of candle light shone through the appropriate tape and projected the color onto a screen. Erasmus Darwin, in 1789, produced a similar contraption that used oil lamps and colored glass instead of candles and tapes. In 1844 there was another one, by someone named D.D. Jameson. And in 1877 there was still another, a light-emitting organ built by the American composer Bainbridge Bishop.

All of these devices were based on an exact correspondence between color and pitch. The idea that such a thing existed gained enormous popularity in the second half of the 19th century, especially in Russia and central Europe.

Just as popular, though, was the idea that color and music could be related in an inexact, subjective way. To realize the possibilities, there was a slew of instruments with fanciful names, among them Alexander Remington's ''color organ'' (1895), Thomas Wilfrid's ''clavilux'' (1905), Adrian Klein's ''color projector'' (1913), Preston Millar's ''chromola'' (1915), Valere Bernard's ''chromophonie'' (1920) and George Lawrence Hall's ''musichrome'' (1930). However different were their mechanisms, their underlying principle was the same; like the light shows that accompanied rock concerts in the 1960s, they were designed to produce plays of color that simply paralleled, in a general manner, the emotional content of concomitant music.

The most famous light-producing musical instrument, of course, was the elaborate ''tastiera per luce'' that Scriabin commissioned for the 1911 premiere in Moscow of his Op. 60 ''Prometheus - Poem of Fire.'' Unfortunately, it went haywire on the night of the performance. But if it had worked, what a display it would have been. It would have projected on a gigantic screen precisely the colors the composer wanted his audience to ''see'' in every one of his notes, the colors that he, supposedly, did see. Much more than an exercise in collective synesthesia, it would have been, like, you know - wow! - psychedelic.

For the moment, James Turrell's ''Drawings in the Sky'' comes in only one shade, a bright, shimmery green that a UFO pilot might mistake for a ''go'' signal from a traffic light. And someone like Scriabin or Rimsky-Korsakov would hear it, literally, as monotonous. But perhaps someday the palette will be expanded to include all sorts of vibrant hues. And if that happens, perhaps someday the St. Louis Symphony might be inclined to move outdoors and attempt to breathe some new life into Scriabin's ''Prometheus.'' After all, in this age of high-tech laser art, the sky's the limit.