It’s relatively common for musicians to associate colors with either keys or tonalities. For example, some musicians may see specific colors in keys, others may associate them with types of harmonies (major, minor, dominant seventh, etc.) But I hesistate to use the word synesthesia with the majority of these cases (although it seems a less clinical definition is accepted.) I’ve always known synesthesia as the actual cross-wiring of senses. So if you hear e-flat, you actually see a color like blue, not just think of one. Like if I hear an augmented chord, I think orange, but I don’t actually see it. Major is green. Minor is blue. But for me at least, it’s more like a mnemonic. Augmented feels orange because both orange and augmented chords are sharp, abrasive, on edge, unstable. Green is stable and well-founded, so is major. Minor is sad, laid back, mellow, so is blue.
I see from the definition that what I do can be described as synesthesia, but clinically (going back to my Psych 101 days), it’s not the same.
For example, in this thread. This sort of association building might or might not be synaesthetic, as you describe. A synaesthete could come up with a set of colors like these. I’m not sure how these color associations came to me. They just came together in my mind when I was playing the piano a lot. Especially sets of pieces designed with one in each key, like Bach’s Inventions and Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, when you can compare them all together.
I’m a synesthete - very much so. I’ve participated in a couple of studies on the matter since I was a kid, one of which involved trying to find out what actually happened in the brain of synesthetes when they associated color/taste/texture to music. From what I recall, the docs could see activation of some parts of the brain related to visual feedback during the presentation of auditory stimuli to synesthetes. That didn’t happen in “normal” people, even if they were told to concentrate really hard on a particular color while they were listening to the musical passage.
So - as far as we know, it’s funky brain wiring. The senses are crossed. It’s thought that this also happens in very young babies, but that the ability is lost (technically) as we grow up. I see letters and numbers with color, music with color, texture and taste, shapes with color, sound, texture and taste… etc. Made for weird reactions from my mom when I told her that triangles really tasted funny and refused to do part of my JK (junior kindergarten, in canada) homework. Also, I used to get REALLY upset about having to color letters a specific color on those classroom handouts… A is red, damnit, not some teacher-assigned color…
That is particularly interesting. I think I may have heard of shapes generating other synaesthetic experiences (tastes, sounds, colours etc.). That would probably be a more general case of associating letters/numbers with those things.
However, the other way round - experiencing tastes as shapes - strikes me intuitively as being more different and unusual. I’d like to hear more.
If Shalmanese or anyone else with synaesthesia would start an “Ask the synaesthetic” thread, that’d be great. I could come up with lots of little experiments to put you through
I’ll be damned. I always associated music with color but never thought it could be anything like synasthesia. I more or less just thought of it as a quirk of the brain. I also see numbers and count them in an upward spiral. I’ve done that since I was a small child. I cannont “see” them in my mind linearly. I wonder what that is all about.
