Synaesthesia – Colours in music

Ah, Spring. Such a yellowish time in our minds. Well at least in my mind. Our human brains are wired in a weird way and sometimes the mind of an individual leads the person on a weird path of association. Synestesia (American) or synaesthesia (British English) is a phenomenon where some form of stimulation or cognitive pathway leads to experiences in a different sensory or cognitive pathway.  Do you see colours while playing or listening to music? This means you could be a synesthete ! Let’s get deeper into this topic…

In a nutshell

WebMD’s Angela Nelson wrote it out pretty well: ”Synaesthesia is when you hear music, but you see shapes. Or you hear a word or a name and instantly see a colour. Synaesthesia is just a fancy name for when you experience one of your senses through another. For example, you might hear the name “Alex” and see green. Or you might read the word “street” and taste citrus fruit.” In this blog article we’re looking at synaesthesia in the form of chromesthesia, sound to color.

Colourful clusters and vibrant vibratos

There are different kinds of experiences in the minds of people with a chromesthetic mind. For example some might see an orange circle when they hear a trumpet and others might find the trumpet’s sound very ”orange”. Individuals with cromesthesia perceive every sound with a colourful sensation spontaneously, without effort, and as their normal realm of experience. This splash of colour is induced by different auditory experiences such as music, speech and/or everyday sounds. For some, it’s the pitch and for some it’s the timbre – the form of chromesthesia depends highly on the individual. However, studies have reported that synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike associate high pitched sounds with lighter or brighter colours and low pitched sounds with darker colors! That has to be hardwired in our lizard brain somehow…

Starts as a child, stays for life

Chromesthesia usually starts in infancy, when the mind is easily altered and very flexible, and doesn’t change its shape during the experiencer’s life. Not that much has been understood about chromesthesia during its time as a scientific phenomenon. The behaviorists from 1920 to 1940 referred to it just as “little more than a learned association”.

Some composers with synaesthetic minds

Franz Liszt  was a composer known for asking performers to play in different colours. When he asked his orchestra to play in a more ”bluer fashion”, they thought he was pulling their leg. That was just how Liszt felt and saw timbre in the orchestra.

Leonard Bernstein described his chromesthesia as ”timbre to colour”. He would hate it when an orchestra or a soloist changed the timbre that he preferred for the section of the piece being performed. Although none of the listeners would feel the difference, his chromesthetic mind would always know.

Amy Beache’s synaesthesia associated each key with a particular colour. If an artist changed the key to suit their voice, she would become upset because it would change the intended sound, portrayal, and emotion of the piece.

Jean Sibelius had synaesthetic talents. He could hear different colours: C major was red, F major was green and D major was yellow. Stories tell, that as a child, the composer would listen to people playing piano at his home and connect the scales and chords to the multi-coloured stripes of a carpet on the floor. The composer’s favourite colour was light green, preferably slightly yellowish rather than bluish. “It’s somewhere between D and E flat,” the composer explained to his secretary.

Closing words

Synaesthesia can be a powerful tool, but it can also have a tendency of being a bit annoying. Just like its cousin, the perfect pitch, you are bound to a set of ”presets” where your mind and associations are out of your own hands. Still, music has a lot of different aspects that everyone can view as dark or bright, red or green, open or closed and we all associate music and sounds in our own way. Powerful emotions are always welcome in our musical minds! We’ll leave you with Sibelius’s symphony no. 2 or as he would call it, the yellow symphony!

Does your mind associate sounds or harmonies with colours or other kinds of phenomena? Write us a comment!

Full time songwriter and performing artist from Finland. Finlands biggest Yanni- fan.

Show all blog posts by Mathias