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He always smirked when he said it, so I’ll leave it to someone with a better understanding of optics to tell me if that’s really true.

He probably smirked for two reasons:

1. Bb below middle C is about 123Hz. Up an octave is doubling the Hz. So this is like that deal where someone asks you if you want a penny doubled every day for a month or $1000 but if you take the penny, you'll get over 10 million dollars. So 1 penny X 2³⁰ is around 1,073,741,824 pennies or $10,737,418. Now, start with 123Hz and double it 40 times and you'll get 123Hz X 2⁴⁰ or 3.95 X 10⁸³Hz. The frequency of one color of yellow is 5.17 X 10¹⁴. So you can see that in frequency, 123Hz raised 40 octaves far, far exceeds the frequency of the color yellow.

2. Sound and light are both measured in terms of frequency, but light is electromagnetic; sound isn't. So no matter how far up you got the sound, you wouldn't get light (well, I supposed that if you could get air molecules vibrating fast enough you could generate some light from the friction but it would happen way before you got to 3.95 X 10⁸³Hz).