This is me standing in Central Park in black and white.
Right now, you are probably not thinking about what color the trees should be, because that's an automatic association.
They're normally green, right? So hey, if you turn the color on, they'll be green.
This is Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and this is the Prelude no. 1 in C major.
Right now, you're probably not wondering what color the notes on the page should be, because notes on pages typically aren't colored.
That is, unless you're like me, and you have synesthesia.
Synesthesia is traditionally defined at the involuntary, automatic, and consistent pairing of two different senses.
Current estimates suggest that about 4% of the population have it, and there are many different ways that it can manifest.
I happen to have grapheme-color synesthesia, which means that letters and numbers have precise color
associations. A is red, B is black/dark blue,
C is kind of a bright yellow,
D is kind of like a teal blue-green, E is a very regal purple, F is kind of a forest green, G is reddish
brown, etc. These associations vary wildly from individual to individual. Another synesthete might strongly disagree with the color associations
I just mentioned. Just as you might strongly disagree that this bowl is orange.
I have other kinds of synesthesia as well. Days of the week have strong color
associations, as well as months from the year. There are other kinds of synesthesia that I don't have. There's lexical-gustatory
synesthesia where names and words are associated with different tastes and flavors.
There's also number form synesthesia where numbers can have three-dimensional spatial relationships.
There's also a kind of synesthesia where numbers can have personalities.
We think that the roots of synesthesia lie in early childhood where the brain first attempts to process multiple senses at the same time.
You take for granted your ability to see me and to hear me and to synthesize that information into an understandable model of what you are
experiencing in the real world. This relationship between your eyes and your ears is called a cross-modal
relationship. Your senses, while distinct, do overlap. For example, your sense of taste and your sense of smell are routinely
extremely cross-modal. A possible explanation for synesthesia is that the developing infant brain goes overboard when trying to link multiple senses together.
FMRI scans in grapheme-color synesthetes show more cross-activation in the visual cortex than in non-synesthetes, so that's entirely possible.
But it's not like when I look on a page, and I see the letter A, it automatically becomes red in my eyes.
It's a little bit more abstract than that.
I don't sense anything different about this A than you do. I do, however, have a strongly colored
concept of A. This is known as ideasthesia, the semantic pairing of the senses.
What exactly do I mean by this? You see,
I'm a musician and not only do I associate the color red with the A in this sentence
But also this A on the bass clef. To me this note is unequivocally red,
and so is the key of a however if we change the meaning of this note to something different by changing the clef, the color
of this note changes
because now this note is F. The meaning of the symbol changed and so did its color. Because of this, chords have colors to me
F major is green red yellow, kind of like the Cameroonian flag. Other musicians with grapheme-color synesthesia report similar
experiences. For example, the Hungarian composer Ligeti wrote, "I feel that all notes have a color,
but I do not have perfect pitch... so that when I say C minor has a
rusty red-brown color and D minor is brown, this does not come from the pitch but from the letters C and D." This experience
is different from another kind of synesthete who experiences sound in color on a much more literal, less abstract level.
I'm talking of course of those who have chromasthesia.
For somebody who is a chromasthete, the sound of E major might be bright
orange and the sound of F# minor might be a dark blue.
People with chromasthesia are likely to have perfect pitch and often experience something called photisms,
Psychosomatic flashes of color and light at the field of their vision that go along with the sounds that they are hearing.
Color relationships often come from things which aren't music-related; the sound of a blender, a bird chirping,
a car engine, or an explosion all might have unique color assocations.
Laurel Smith, synesthetic musician, writes, "It is as inconceivable to hear a flute without seeing an intensely bright pitch color as it is to look into a
well polished mirror and see nothing."
Synesthesia gives some people additional sensory experiences, which can be useful for some things, like
memorization. For example, when I visualize notes and patterns on my bass guitar,
they are colored. This fret right here is green because it's an F.
The fret right next to it is purple because it's an E. If I use a different tuning system, the colors change,
but only after I've relearned where the notes are. Since I mainly use standard tuning,
I'm most used to thinking about this fret as being red because it's, well, an A. This might seem a little strange,
but that's just how I experience playing music.
There's a great video from blind YouTuber Tommy Edison where he tries to get sighted people to explain the concept of color to him. The
explanations are great honestly, but even then there's no real way of communicating
what color is to somebody who has never seen anything before. So, with that in mind,
I'm going to do my best to explain how grapheme-color synesthesia works for me.
Let's go back to the beginning of this video and look at this image of me standing in Central Park. If we turn on the
colors and they turn out to be completely wrong,
that's a similar experience for me as looking at this image of the Prelude number 1,
turning on the color, and the colors not aligning with my personal synesthetic
representation of what the colors should be.
There's a palpable sense of relief when the colors change from what they aren't supposed to be to what they are supposed to be.
That's one explanation,
but even then that's not quite exactly what it is.
You know, it's kind of almost as if other people are colorblind to music, but that's
not even really it either. The difficulty of me trying to explain my synesthetic experience to you or
explain any kind of personal experience as I feel it is something called the
Explanatory Gap. In philosophy the subjective experiences of the senses are known as
qualia. Even if we agree that this bowl is green, the quale of
greenness might be experienced differently for you. According to Wikipedia, qualia are the raw feels of experience.
Our language is not equipped to
communicate these raw feels to one another, which is why Tommy Edison won't be able to see color when people explain it to him
We can agree that this is an F major chord
It has all the hallmarks of F major. It has the major third and perfect fifth of the equal-tempered scale,
It has the notes F, A, and C,
which vibrate at specific frequencies which we can measure, but the quale of F major, how it feels, how it sounds, remains very
personal. We can communicate some of these feelings, but there's no way of understanding how F major sounds to you.
So in order to communicate thoughts and attempt to share our experiences we often use language as a
metaphor. Have you ever eaten a sharp cheddar cheese? How about these loud shoes?
"I'm sorry, was that applause? I couldn't hear it over Ryan's shoes."
Let's take for instance the oft-cited study of Bouba and Kiki. Across all cultures and all
languages, when subjects are asked which shape is Bouba and which shape is Kiki, Kiki is almost always
identified as the shape on the right and Bouba is identified as the shape on the left. Our cross-modal
perception of the sharp consonants in the word Kiki "Kiki"
tells us about the spikier lines of the shape better suit that word than the rounder sound of Bouba. "Bouba."
Cross-modal metaphor is everywhere in language,
especially when it comes to musical ideas and
concepts. "That riff was really heavy." "It has a lot of harmonic color." "That snare sounds punchy." "Your tone is really fat and beefy."
"That flute, though, sounds light and airy." "That performance was
electrifying." "That melody is really sweet; too sweet, to the point of being cloying and
saccharine." We use metaphor all the time in music. A recent study from synesthesia researcher Jamie Ward found a strong relationship between
color brightness and pitch, even among non-synesthetes. Synesthetes shows consistency of hue among different musical timbres,
that the control group did not. But both groups ranked pitch in terms of brightness of color. In English we use
high-low metaphors to describe pitch. There are occasionally reports of synesthetes
seeing higher pitches in physical space than lower pitches.
But other languages have different metaphors to describe the exact same thing. In Farsi, Turkish, and the
Mexican language known as Zapotec, it is much more common to use a
thin-thick metaphor to describe pitch. I have not found any research comparing synesthetes who speak different native languages,
but I wonder how their synesthetic experiences would be different if they spoke Farsi, for example. Would the metaphors of their language
physically alter their perception of the music that they are listening to?
Kandinsky the 20th century abstract artist intellectualized his synesthesia.
He closely related his sound color relationships with Schoenberg's
twelve-tone music and sought a universal translation scheme among all the senses.
It was a grand and overreaching ambition,
but it wasn't that much different from how we use language already. Cross-modal metaphorical descriptions are everywhere,
and they are fundamental to how we experience the world. I like to think of synesthesia as kind of an extended metaphor,
embedded in certain people, closely tied to the language that they speak. In this way, we all are a little bit synesthetic.
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b a s s .