One of last week's words on the A.Word.A.Day list was "synesthesia" which
refers to the merging by the brain of unlike stimuli. For example, some
people see a particular color when they hear a particular musical tone.
Below are comments relevant to music from AWAD readers. The last comment
attempts to link perfect pitch ability with synesthetic response. I will
ask everyone here if they experience synesthesia, and what is it like, how
does it affect their musicality?
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My sister is a synesthete. We discovered her talent one day when she had
been studying the Lewis and Clark expedition and she remarked, "Sargeant
Ordway is blue." We now have her labeling each member of the Expedition by
color. I am also somewhat of a synesthete, as I see certain letters,
numbers, musical composers and keys in color (the key of E is most
definitely dusty yellow).
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This extrasensory trait seems also to be found not infrequently in
musicians. As musicians, most of us deal to some extent with musical
"colors" and "coloring," but not necessarily in the visible spectrum!
Still, I once heard a violinist urging her rather perplexed quartet
mates to "go for green" in a particular classical piece. "It's
just...green," she tried to explain, unhelpfully I thought. They
obviously didn't get it, but I didn't exactly either.
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The phenomenon of synesthesia has been of interest in the field of
psychology of music since the 1960s. Synesthesia is basically a
multisensory response to a stimulus. In addition to hearing a musical
tone, the respondent experiences the musical tone simultaneously in a
non-auditory manner, such as by seeing a color or smelling an aroma.
The experience is one of conscious sensation, not merely verbal
association. To be precise, there is a type of synesthesia that
describes the form of "color hearing" called chromesthesia, whereby a
musical tone elicits a color as well as an auditory sensation. In a
well-known case study conducted over a period of five years, music
psychologists Haack and Radocy (1981) reveal how an art teacher
demonstrates a remarkable range and consistency of tone-color sensory
linkages. Absolute pitch (the ability to identify or produce a
musical tone without the aid of an external reference tone), which
the art teacher possesses independently of her chromesthesia, shows
less stability than the chromesthesia. For her, high octaves of a
musical tone tend to evoke a lighter color value, and lower octaves a
darker value. "Black key" pitches are reported to elicit a greater
color intensity. Interestingly, rapid arpeggiated, major chord tone
sequences elicit chromesthetic response involving rapid flashes of
colors, "somewhat like fireworks exploding." I am not sure if there
is such a thing as absolute synesthesia (or absolute chromesthesia,
for this matter), whereby people with chromesthesia consistently
experience the exact same tone-color perceptions.
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{ David Goldberg: [EMAIL PROTECTED] }
{ Math Dept, Washtenaw Community College }
{ Ann Arbor Michigan }
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