July 18, 2008
So, this is part two of a little series of blogs I’m calling “your brain on music.” Last time, I wrote about amusia, a neurological condition that makes it impossible for the sufferer to perceive music. On the other end of the spectrum, today’s topic is arguably an enhancement of the music listening experience: synesthesia.
In the music world, we most commonly think of synesthesia as a harmless condition that causes one to associate particular colors with particular musical sounds. However, that actually describes only one manifestation of a much broader type of neurological event – in other words, the brain can (somewhat arbitrarily) link your sense experiences in many different combinations, as explained in this definition of synesthesia I found on an MIT website: “an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense.” The experience ranges from “smelling sounds” to perceiving that certain words have an inherent taste.
It is probably no coincidence that a number of famous musicians and artists have reported having synesthesia, including LA-based painter David Hockney, who sees colors when he hears music. Kandinsky also had a similar kind of synesthesia, and composers Duke Ellington, Franz Liszt, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Leonard Bernstein, Jean Sibelius and Olivier Messiaen all had variations on the music-color visions. Composer György Ligeti and author Vladimir Nabokov both had a form of synesthesia in which letters and numbers are each seen with a different color – and each synesthete associates different colors with the same numbers and letters, so it is a highly individual experience, no two rainbow alphabets being the same. You can find more synesthete artists and fuller descriptions of their visions on Wikipedia.
If you’re curious about what it would be like to hear/see music this way, you can experience a simulation on YouTube that approximates hearing a Chopin Nocturne with music-color synesthesia. The creators of the video have mapped different colors onto the intervals between the notes.
Enjoy!