Comment by jacquesm

Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. It's when you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular' Western scales, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones has no real equivalent in color.