I was listening to the Rolling Stones today in the car, there was a bunch of traffic but I didn’t care, as long as I could listen to the guitar from “Sympathy for the Devil.” You know the guitar I’m talking about, the gritty, impromptu crunch that shows up every now and then. God! how I love that crunch. It’s like a mixture of red and orange, because of the intensity, and sharp and cracked because it’s so full, so far from the hollow blue sound of an acoustic guitar. But then again, how can it be all those things? It’s just sound, only moving air, and yet somehow it makes me think red and somehow it makes sense.
On a similar vein, and stay with me here because I’m changing gears quickly, have you ever looked at the the letter ‘K,’ how it’s jagged and pointy, and thought, well of all the shapes that could possibly represent the ‘K’ sound, they did a pretty good job of designing one that looks like it should sound? Try ‘S’ or ‘U’ on, and you’ll start to see just how well designed the alphabet is, it’s darn right logical.
Of course, it wouldn’t be that hard for anyone to come up with their own examples of music relating to shapes and colors, and it wouldn’t be hard to see the logic of making the ‘K’ look like it sounds. But what if you had no choice, or what if the relating of two different senses, of hearing and seeing for example, happened with every letter, word, paragraph you looked at? For some people, ‘K’ not only has a distinct look and sound, but maybe even a color or a taste.
It’s called Synesthesia, and roughly 1 in 23 people have it. It occurs in healthy brains and can affect people who have no other mental abnormalities. Somewhere along the way, brains affected by synesthesia were wired to have more than one sense react to the same stimulus. For instance, I might see a cat and hear a piano, or vice versa, even when only one of the stimuli are present.
Granted, such examples are extreme. Normally, those with synesthesia have one of the few basic types, colors being assigned to music or letters and numbers. But it goes a step farther than normal association. I associate some sounds with reds and oranges, and thusly classify them as warm sounds. Synesthetes, on the other hand, will actually see blue when they hear the blues.
Duke Ellington did just that … well, almost. Ellington had a particular type of synesthesia, one where each musical instrument has it’s own color, because his synesthesia was a timbre-color connecting form. Timbre, briefly, is the part of sound that allows us to tell the difference between, oh, say a B flat from a guitar and a B flat from a cello.
“I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one color. I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different color. When I hear sustained musical tones, I see just about the same colors that you do, but I see them in textures. If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin.” +
I’ve always guessed that those with synesthesia, (I am not one of them, by the way), have probably benefited from an immense sense of creativity. With the world being painted a different set of colors every way you look, I would think the additional sensory experiance would be an ideal starting point for many artists. And like the deaf or mute, I would think that the senses effected by synesthesia would be strengthened and relied on more heavily.
But what, you might say, what if a person had synesthesia, but was also left without the use of one or more senses, either by birth or another event? Spotlight: Stevie Wonder. Wonder, who is blind, also has sound-color synesthesia, and though he can not see the instruments he’s playing, in his minds eye he probably holds the ability to see the music he is composing more clearly than those who posess the ability to see.
And that in short is how music, to some, is color. For more info on synesthesia, try looking at the American Synesthesia Association’s website, this very wordy science document, or the Mixed Signals online interactive synesthesia. Also, there’s a well maintained list of article links at the Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens website, the companion to the book of the same name, which is available from Amazon.
