# Synaesthesia



## JackRance (Sep 13, 2021)

One of my favorite pianists today, Vikingur Olafsson, suffers from synaesthesia. A little while ago I had no idea what it was. Now I have discovered what it is and I have discovered that I too suffer a lot from synaesthesia.

For those who don't know, synaesthesia is a condition in which the brain is able to process data from several senses at once. Therefore it means that there is often an experience of simultaneous perception and that sounds, letter and numbers, months, concepts or words are often associated with colors, tastes or smells...
Olafsson associates the F minor tonality with the blue, which is for me definitively orange.

So what colors would you associate with great composers, great musical pieces or another musical stuff?

For me:

D minor key is yellow.
F minor is orange.
F major is red.
A flat major is violet.
G flat major is pink.
A major is green.
A minor is grey.
C major is a red darker than f major.

Britten is a transparent blue as Mahler.
Debussy is green, but it changes a lot.
Stravinsky is multicolored in Russian Period, Yellow/Red/Orange in Classical Period, blue and violet in Atonal Period.
Atonal music is blue/violet.
Classical is is yellow/red/orange.
Ravel's Sheherazade is green.


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## KevinW (Nov 21, 2021)

I do not quite remember whom, but I think many musicians (especially those in the 20th centuries) have synaesthesia. It is definitely not a bad thing and I would say it helps you understand music much better than people who do not have, such as me. However, I do sometimes assiociate Vivaldi with gold, Bach with light grey, Mozart with orange, Beethoven with brown/dark grey (partially because of his portrait, idk), and dark white for Haydn.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

KevinW said:


> I do not quite remember whom, but I think many musicians (especially those in the 20th centuries) have synaesthesia.


Composers: according to Wikipedia Liszt, Sibelius and Wagner - not sure how accurate that is (never heard it before). Not included in that list, but Scriabin and Messiaen are definite examples. Among musicians, Itzhak Perlman stands out in the Wiki list, as well as some of my favourite pop/rock singers, such as Tori Amos.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

JackRance said:


> One of my favorite pianists today, Vikingur Olafsson, suffers from synaesthesia. A little while ago I had no idea what it was. Now I have discovered what it is and I have discovered that I too suffer a lot from synaesthesia.


How does that work? Like for Scheherazade, do you actually see the color green, so all colors in the room become green,or is it more of a feeling?

Personally, the only thing like that I experience is, when I hear Karajan's Berlin strings, I feel like I'm tasting melted chocolate.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I remember mentioning on another thread that some of Peter Maxwell Davies' more dramatic Orcadian works bring to mind black and silver - the hostile environment of a choppy winter sea at night with the cold moon above, and maybe the sporadic white flash from a distant lighthouse.


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## JackRance (Sep 13, 2021)

Yes Messiaen had synaesthesia.


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## JackRance (Sep 13, 2021)

Manxfeeder said:


> How does that work? Like for Scheherazade, do you actually see the color green, so all colors in the room become green,or is it more of a feeling?
> 
> Personally, the only thing like that I experience is, when I hear Karajan's Berlin strings, I feel like I'm tasting melted chocolate.


Is not only like a feeling, I see definitively the color green, but it's like something that cover the others thing i see, but is not all green, but like green stripes, circles and also I imagine some specifical things, like the sea, flowers, a french horn, etc. but in the most intense moment i see all green. I can also, if I concentrate, see everything normal, but if i watch all absently and without focus in something I see green.
This video can explain quite well how synaesthesia is:


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## KevinW (Nov 21, 2021)

I get what that is, but never had that feeling. Is your feeling always what the composer wants to convey through music?


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## BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist (Jan 13, 2019)

I find it fades as you age. YMMV.


So can perfect pitch, actually.

In 8th grade physics, we were discussing frequency, and either I or one of my classmates (most likely the latter as I was very shy) told my teacher I had perfect pitch. He decided to test me, and played a frequency from his computer asking me what it was. I responded "A - 440 Hertz", though I could tell it was just a little bit sharp. He was impressed, and told me that it was actually 440.5 Hertz, but that very few people could tell the difference. I kept it to myself that I could recognize the margin, but I don't think I've ever felt so special. :lol:

Fast forward 8 years later, and I'm sometimes off by as much as a whole semitone. Certain timbres (e.g. piano) and certain notes (e.g. the open strings of a guitar) - those which are more firmly ingrained in my memory - I just about never mess up. But who knows? In 10 years I might not have it at all.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Does it change depending on different tuning methods?


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

JackRance said:


> One of my favorite pianists today, Vikingur Olafsson, suffers from synaesthesia. A little while ago I had no idea what it was. Now I have discovered what it is and I have discovered that I too suffer a lot from synaesthesia.
> 
> For those who don't know, synaesthesia is a condition in which the brain is able to process data from several senses at once. Therefore it means that there is often an experience of simultaneous perception and that sounds, letter and numbers, months, concepts or words are often associated with colors, tastes or smells...
> Olafsson associates the F minor tonality with the blue, which is for me definitively orange.
> ...


I wouldn't use the word "suffer". I enjoy synaesthesic feelings - which I can experience from both music and far less exciting things (like spreadsheets!). I do get colours sometimes, not always the same ones, but I also get images like artworks but not an artwork that I have ever seen. If I could draw and paint I could probably make a living from it!


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## BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist (Jan 13, 2019)

Enthusiast said:


> I wouldn't use the word "suffer". I enjoy synaesthesic feelings - which I can experience from both music and far less exciting things (like spreadsheets!). I do get colours sometimes, not always the same ones, but I also get images like artworks but not an artwork that I have ever seen. If I could draw and paint I could probably make a living from it!


Has your synesthesia faded at all since you were a child / teen?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

I have very definite color associations with letters, numbers, days of the week, and musical keys, and I could list them, but it's not synesthesia. Most likely I saw and studied illustrated children's books in my preschool years that happened to use different colors for the letters and numbers I was supposed to be learning. I suspect these associations, which to this day feel natural and invariable, are just conflations of connections I made early in life.

There is an anecdote I read in a biography of Rachmaninoff, which I am about to butcher because of poor memory, that bears on this issue. Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Rimsky-Korsakoff walk into a bar  in Paris and Scriabin is soon holding forth on his synesthetic associations with musical keys. R-K, who also experiences synesthesia, supports his position, although they disagree about which keys are which color. But they both agree that D major is golden-yellow. Rachmaninoff is skeptical and tells them he thinks it's nonsense. R-K then says: "So you think it's just coincidence that you used the key of D major in [your opera] _The Miserly Knight_ when the hero opens and sees the contents of a chest filled with gold?" Rachmaninoff answers that he was just thinking of a scene from one of R-K's operas where a scene featuring gold happened to be set in the key of D and that it has nothing to do with synesthesia, only memory.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist said:


> Has your synesthesia faded at all since you were a child / teen?


I think maybe it is more now. But I am less likely to dwell on it.


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

I have a mild synaesthesia thing - merging smells and colours. But I get no colour effects with music. 

What does this prove? Nothing.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

EdwardBast said:


> R-K then says: "So you think it's just coincidence that you used the key of D major in [your opera] _The Miserly Knight_ when the hero opens and sees the contents of a chest filled with gold?" Rachmaninoff answers that he was just thinking of a scene from one of R-K's operas where a scene featuring gold happened to be set in the key of D and that it has nothing to do with synesthesia, only memory.


Yeah, I thought it was pretty funny when I came across it too, lol.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Manxfeeder said:


> How does that work? Like for Scheherazade, do you actually see the color green, so all colors in the room become green,or is it more of a feeling?


I somewhat "feel" (it's not quite "seeing") it clouding around my vision, in the edges. I don't have synaesthesia, but for some reason I "feel" emerald in this _very particular_ style (in stances like 5:30~7:15)


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Synaesthesia helps me with contemporary music. Getting a flavour for a piece that is initially quite alien opens up the whole piece for me. Or maybe it is the other way around? Perhaps the piece starts to talk to me and that brings on the colour/image flavour? I don't get any music related synaesthesia until the music is becoming meaningful to me.


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## KevinW (Nov 21, 2021)

I can pretty much relate Mozart Piano Concerto No.21 second movement with Christmas. Nobody interprets it in this way so far, as I know. Happy Christmas, everyone.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

"Born on a Blue Day" by Daniel Tammet is a book about having synaesthesia. Tammet experiences many different senses as colors or shapes, including numbers. He was able to memorize pi to 22,514 places simply by walking through the landscape of the random numbers laid out before him, as each digit had a unique color and shape.

It's a drop-dead fascinating read.


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## Waehnen (Oct 31, 2021)

I feel colours and shapes and emotions, especially when I am composing. Nevertheless the colours are not consistently the same, this semi-synestesia of mine is not a systematic automation. But I do feel different keys and notes differently. It is the same with musical textures which I feel as physical textures.

I would think this is rather common? After all us humans deal with the same reality through all the senses.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

JackRance said:


> This video can explain quite well how synaesthesia is:


Wow. It's like "Yellow Submarine," but with sperms.


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## golfer72 (Jan 27, 2018)

Arthur Bliss has a "Colour Symphony". Did he have this condition as well?


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

I'm in a FB synæsthesia group, not because I'm a full-blown synæsthete (I sometimes have some inklings of it), but because I have an associated "talent" (empathic), and as a former doctor I love everything about the nervous system, including how the brain works.

Everyone with synæsthesia pretty much experiences it differently, but there's also some commonalities most share, and there are types of synæsthesia that are more common. Have 3 different Synæsthetes describe the color of a given sound, you'll likely get three different colors.

For most, sounds are accompanied by visuals; colors and shapes that change. Unless they have parents that also have this, they often don't even know that they hear/see things differently. A lot of them "discover" their variant thusly: 

_*"I love this song. It looks so great."*_
*"You mean 'It sounds so great', right?"
"No, I mean the beautiful colors and shapes."
"What are you talking about?"
"You know, the way the colors swirl around the room as they come out of the speakers."
"What?"*
_*"You don't see the colors?"*_

Often people with synæsthesia will have OTHER neurological variants as well: They may be empathic, autistic, psychic, have migraines, epilepsy, dyslexia, learning challenges, see auras. 

Oh, the variants: A sound may be associated with a smell, and vice versa. Some think numbers or days of the week have color. Really, the variants are practically endless.

Some can turn it "off", some can't. Some learn to ignore it - and there's a theory that we're all born as blank slates and "learn" to ignore visual and aural inputs that are irrelevant. So, yes, you can "grow out of it".

The brain is astonishing, how it adapts, copes, or goes off the rails. I love the Oliver Sacks books, especially The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat . . . A book about folks that have had strokes on the "not usual" side of the brain: Most folks seem to have strokes on the left side of their brain, which can result in paralysis on their right side. The man in the title of the book had trouble processing visual information of static objects - the title here refers to his wife sitting on the large hat/coat rack in the foyer, motionless, and he grabbed her head because he reasoned that she must be his hat, as she was in the "hat place". 

The brain figures out "work-arounds" for stuff. Once, as Sacks was interviewing this guy, the guy asked "Those are my shoes, yes?". This is the same as the children figuring out that Dad can't read, because Dad always had "work-arounds" like "Oh, I forgot my glasses", "this print is too small", "read this for me, I'm trying to find my keys".


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

golfer72 said:


> Arthur Bliss has a "Colour Symphony". Did he have this condition as well?


*Sir Arthur Bliss*, who wrote his *"Colour Symphony"* in 1922, was _*not*_ a synesthete. 

He was simply yet another influenced by the ideas of "color music", although, for him, it did not come with the trappings of mystic religions, but, rather, with British traditions. The symphony features four movements: Purple; Red; Blue; and Green. Bliss based this work upon the *symbolism* generally associated with the colors in *traditional English heraldry*, along the following lines: 

Purple - Amethysts, Pageantry, Royalty - and Death; 
Red - Rubies, Wine, Furnaces, Magic; 
Blue - Sapphires, Deep Water, Skies, Loyalty, Melancholy; 
Green - Emeralds, Hope, Youth, Joy, Spring, and Victory


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

pianozach said:


> A sound may be associated with a smell, and vice versa.


I guess the closest I come to synaethesia is that some landscapes remind me of a piece of music, an association (I surmise?) of what I was listening to when I drove through this place for the first time.


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

NoCoPilot said:


> I guess the closest I come to synaethesia is that some landscapes remind me of a piece of music, an association (I surmise?) of what I first heard when I drove through this place for the first time.


Yep. Some very latent synæesthesia there. Something visual "reminding" you of music. If you "hear" it, then it's synesthesia; if you imagine a piece of music, then it's "association". 

But it's still something that happens in your brain, and the two things _are_ _*similar*_.

How about this . . . you see a photo of a place you've been, and you can smell the place. 

Here's something else: Both *migraines* and *seizures* can be preceded by smelling a particular odor, even though that odor isn't there (usually referred to as a warning "aura"). It's because migraines and seizures have some similarities, especially WHERE in the brain they originate. If you are an epileptic, you might have a Service Dog that can "sense" when you are about to have a seizure . . . How does it know? We're not sure, but people have energy fields (some folks call 'em auras) that change, or maybe the dog can sense the change in your demeanor, or body language, or maybe it can smell a change in your pheromones. Who knows, maybe the dog can HEAR it coming. This isn't really an anecdote about how a dog can sense this, but about how your brain has now started doing something DIFFERENT without your conscious knowledge, and it's a big enough change that a dog can sense the change.

The Brain. Wondrous.

I shall tell you a short story . . . You are sitting in a meadow, leaning up against a sturdy tree on a mound. You can feel the warmth of the sunshine on your skin, and the scratchiness and stiffness of the new plaid plaid shirt you're wearing, as well as the softness of the very old jeans. You can smell the long grass, the flowers, and the still-damp earth, which you can feel with your bare feet. There are a couple of birds in the tree that seem to be engaging in some sort of call and response. Across from you, on the other side of the meadow, you hear laughter, first that of a child, then also from what sounds like a young woman. 

These are just words, but if you have even a small amount of "imagination", you can hear, feel, smell, and see all of these things as you read them. This has not necessarily ever happened to you, but you might actually experience it. You can SMELL and FEEL these things . . . HOW IS THAT?

The Brain.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

I've done that, smelled a place while looking at a photograph. I also have some environmental recordings I have made ("phonography") and I can get smells from the sounds too.

And yes, entire epic novels have been written about the memories triggered by a smell.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Rimsky -Korsakov had synesthesia , and. once said this : Wagner's Die Walkure ends in E major when Brunnhilde is put to sleep with Wotan's magic fire . But this. was not the color of fire for Rimsky . I don't recall which color represented fire to him .


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## Simon Moon (Oct 10, 2013)

Contemporary composer, Michael Torke, has Synesthesia. He is often called a "post minimalist".

I'm not really a fan of minimalism, but I like his piece "One", which happens to be based on his synaesthesia.

It is comprised of: Green, Purple, Ecstatic Orange, Ash, Bright Blue Music

Michael Torke - one







Synesthesia is not completely understood, but it is most likely caused by a high level of interconnectedness in the brain. In other words, some of the nerve signals from the visual cortex may also interact with the auditory (or taste) areas of the brain.

Partial list of other musicians with Synesthesia:

Duke Ellington - sound to color
Billy Joel - multiple
Torri Amos - sound to color
Marian McPartland - sound to color
Andy Partridge - multiple


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