Synesthesia : Classic or Dud?

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Well, this is that facility some people have of seeing music as colour. Without acid.

Trouble is, if the music is discordant, would that manifest itself in nasty visions? Would they have to surround themselves in pleasant orchstral pieces, or Orb records?

Fill me in, you who knows. Or you who guess...

― mark grout (mark grout), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 14:56 (8 years ago) Permalink

so classic. i really wish i had this

― common_person (common_person), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:05 (8 years ago) Permalink

if the music is discordant, would that manifest itself in nasty visions?

no, from what i've read, pitches have their own characteristics and personalities unique to each synasthete, and it doesn't necessarily follow western tonality. olivier messiaen had it and plenty of his music is not traditionally tonal.

― common_person (common_person), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:08 (8 years ago) Permalink

I heared (heck, it was him who said it) that Emile Ford of "What do you want to make those eyes at me for boy" fame had this, he went into hi-fi design and made millions...

― mark grout (mark grout), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:10 (8 years ago) Permalink

i don't know who that is.
sci american article about synaesthesia

― common_person (common_person), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:13 (8 years ago) Permalink

Classic. People who've read what I write about how I listen to music have emailed me to ask if I have it, but I don't; I wish I did.

― Sick Mouthy (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:15 (8 years ago) Permalink

"We also observed one case in which we believe cross activation enables a colorblind synesthete to see numbers tinged with hues he otherwise cannot perceive; charmingly, he refers to these as "Martian colors." Although his retinal color receptors cannot process certain wavelengths, we suggest that his brain color area is working just fine and being cross-activated when he sees numbers."

― common_person (common_person), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:17 (8 years ago) Permalink

thought this thread was about the frontline assembly/delirium side project.

never heard much about this syndrome until now, but classic nonetheless¡

― dyson (dyson), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:26 (8 years ago) Permalink

I thought it was about my favourite local record store!

― OCP (OCP), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:49 (8 years ago) Permalink

totally classic. it would actually make listening to scriabin enjoyable.

and listening to messiaen even _more_ enjoyable.

― you will be shot (you will be shot), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 15:55 (8 years ago) Permalink

I have this, in that I have perfect pitch/can play most songs I hear on the radio by ear and part of what facilitates me being able to do this is linking chords with certain colors in my head. My schematic doesn't really make any sense spectrum-wise (e.g. C associated with blue/sky, D associated with yellow/sun/morning/youthfulness, E associated with black/nighttime/agedness, F associated with red, etc.), but hey, it works.

The perfect pitch thing, from what I've understand/have read on it (there's a guy at Yale who does fMRI research on it), is a genetic anomaly that can't be trained/taught. I think the pairing/associating with colors is a conditioning thing that I must have picked up at an early age (I can't remember when it started).

People always talk about synesthesia like it's some 'heavy', mystical thing; I think it's better explained as a behavioral/cognitive/affective thing.

― Joe (Joe), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 16:01 (8 years ago) Permalink

check out that article i linked. researchers have mostly ruled out synaesthesia as something 'picked up' at an early age, they think it's a biological thing just like perfect pitch. fuck mysticism, i think it's absolutely fascinating as a cognitive, how the mind works thing

― common_person (common_person), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 16:13 (8 years ago) Permalink

other ilxers that i believe have this: mel w and (okay, ex-ilxer) fred solinger

― m. (mitchlnw), Wednesday, 23 June 2004 16:34 (8 years ago) Permalink

joe, some q's

1 - you have 12 colors not 7 obviously? so what do you see when you hear a blue note, heavy vibrato, melisma, etc
2 - is middle c the same color blue as high c or any other octave?
3 - have you tested your perfect pitch to a = 440 c/s? ie how perfect is your perfect do you suppose
4 - obviously lots of rock recordings are not made to the same pitch [ie the guitars are tuned to each other but not to perfect pitch] so when you listen to the radio and one song ends and another begins, it must often happen that their pitches are tuned "off", what's that like
5 - does whistling drive you nuts? i don't have p.p. but i do have intervalic sense or whatever, and whistlers never ever get intervals anywhere near correct, and it usually distracts me no end
6 - your synaesthesia seems to have lots of non-color emotional or cultural bits going on ["agedness" etc] in addition to the predictable color with sound thing... how common is that for synaesthetes of the pitch making color variety, do you know?

― mig (mig), Thursday, 24 June 2004 03:28 (8 years ago) Permalink

Me. As I have no music training I judge my own and others work entirely on it's synaesthesic qualities. Hey, it's a free country.

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Thursday, 24 June 2004 03:39 (8 years ago) Permalink

Australia is anyway. Sorry if your country isn't.

― the music mole (colin s barrow), Thursday, 24 June 2004 03:40 (8 years ago) Permalink

4 years pass...

Back to this. Of course music has colors. I am wondering what sort of hard science there is that links sound with light and explains this.

― u s steel, Tuesday, 24 March 2009 02:47 (4 years ago) Permalink

I'm very very ignorant about science but I quite doubt there is any

For one, I seriously doubt there is such a thing as innate colour-sound relations (and not on a basic 'we hear/see things differently level), but at least my 'seeing' music is more often than not motivated by contextual factors (usually record sleeves - and I've had visions change after buying records and seeing the sleeve for instance)

Also, it's not just sound and vision, but all the other senses too.

― mehlt, Tuesday, 24 March 2009 03:15 (4 years ago) Permalink

well maybe not that serious doubt, but these things don't strike me as being stable/consistent.

I have found using basic colour theory to mix records a very useful skill at times though!

― mehlt, Tuesday, 24 March 2009 03:18 (4 years ago) Permalink

Diff ppl seem to describe their synesthesia in diff ways.

My bf sees not just colours but shapes and machinery, as well. Esp with very complex things like Autechre.

Also he sees the days of the week as various... heights, is the best way to put it?

― one art, please (Trayce), Tuesday, 24 March 2009 03:51 (4 years ago) Permalink

Oh yes, concepts can be expressed in other sense too. Sometimes, when I've been staying up late on essays I can imagine them in colour.

I imagine music and vision are just the senses that I guess fire off more cognitive stimuli, but also are the senses we think the most in, which is why the rest get slept on.

― mehlt, Tuesday, 24 March 2009 04:17 (4 years ago) Permalink

6 months pass...

halfway through a mix of "mostly pink" songs it's occurred to me that this might be an unusual way to organize music, though it makes perfect sense, aesthetically anyways, to me. i dont ascribe any deep mystical awareness or anything. it occurs immediately, even the first time i hear something, so im sure its just my brain making sense of things along the lines of some associations i can't exactly reconstitute, or something.

― rent, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 12:52 (3 years ago) Permalink

I've at times mixed tracks according to colour theory.

― EDB, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 15:11 (3 years ago) Permalink

2 years pass...

I was wondering the other day whether there was any consistency to synaesthesia across synaesthetes or if it was a purely personal-associative thing. It seems to be the latter, but there is a very interesting article in the last New Scientist about Neil Harbisson, who only sees in shades of grey (oh, how on the zeitgeist), but has an 'eyeborg' that translates colours into sound for him, so he has some *sense* of the differences.

― emil.y, Wednesday, 15 August 2012 13:44 (10 months ago) Permalink

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