Update: at my lesson, I held different color images in my head while playing. The same piece did sound and feel different each time. I know there’s no way to prove this, but I think that a “light pink” sounded different than a “dark olive.” I think it can help me with tonal consistancy. (Please don’t make fun of me.)
It’s all in your head.
As I social constructionist, I assume that to be true about everything.
Some things are more in your head than others. If 99.9% of people can agree to the color red, calling it “in your head” seems kind of pointless, except on a very basic philosophical level. The same cannot be said of synaesthesism.
What my teacher and I agreed upon was to have me place my own color on my own note tone and then try to stay consistent with that–like a pink c will always sound like a pink c…at least that’s how I understand it.
This could be true, but don’t expect that when someone else holds “dark olive” in their head, it doesn’t sound anything like you think it should. The concept of ‘tone color’ is just a poor analogy for ‘timbre’. Certain terms like ‘bright’ or ‘dark’ or ‘brassy’ or ‘rosy’ may have a range of agreed-upon meanings among musicians, but certainly not “yellow” or “red” or “blue” (of course there are “blue notes” but those refer to chords and intervals, not to timbre).
Definitely–we discussed that too. It’s a tough concept to wrap my head around but I know that it sounded different.