Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (19 page)

T
HE IMAGE OF
the blind musician or the blind poet has an almost mythic resonance, as if the gods have given the gifts of music or poetry in compensation for the sense they have taken away. Blind musicians and bards have played a special role in many cultures, as wandering minstrels, court performers, religious cantors. For centuries, there was a tradition of blind church organists in Europe. There are many blind musicians, especially (though not exclusively) in the world of gospel, blues, and jazz— Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Art Tatum, José Feliciano, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Doc Watson are only a few. Many such artists, indeed, have “Blind” added to their names almost as an honorific: Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson.

The channeling of blind people into musical performance is partly a social phenomenon, since the blind were perceived as being cut off from many other occupations. But social forces here are matched by strong internal forces. Blind children are often precociously verbal and develop unusual verbal memories; many of them are similarly drawn to music and motivated to make it central to their lives. Children who lack a visual world will naturally discover or create a rich world of touch and sound.
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At least there are many anecdotes to suggest this, but Adam Ockelford has moved beyond these casual observations to systematic studies in the last twenty years or so. Ockelford has worked as a music teacher at a school for the blind, and is now director of education at the Royal National Institute of the Blind in London. He has been especially concerned with a rare congenital condition, septo-optic dysplasia, which leads to visual impairment, sometimes relatively mild but often profound. Working with Linda Pring, Graham Welch, and Darold Treffert, he compared thirty-two families of children with this condition to an equal number of control families. Half of the children with SOD had no vision or could perceive only light or movement (they were ranked as “blind”); the other half were “partially sighted.” Ockelford et al. noted that there was far more interest in music among the blind and the partially sighted than among the fully sighted. One mother, speaking of her seven-year-old blind daughter, said, “Her music is always with her. If there is not music playing, she is singing. She listens to music while in the car, while falling asleep, and loves to play the piano and any other instrument.”

Though the partially sighted children also showed a heightened interest in music, exceptional musical abilities were observed only in the blind children— abilities that surfaced spontaneously, without any formal teaching. Thus it was not SOD as such but the degree of blindness, the fact of not having a significant visual world, that played a key role in stimulating the musical propensities and abilities of the blind children.

In various other studies, Ockelford found that 40 to 60 percent of the blind children he taught had absolute pitch, and a recent study by Hamilton, Pascual-Leone, and Schlaug also found that 60 percent of blind musicians had absolute pitch, as opposed to perhaps 10 percent among sighted musicians. In normally sighted musicians, early musical training (before the age of six or eight) is crucial in the development or maintenance of absolute pitch— but in these blind musicians, absolute pitch was common even when musical training had been started relatively late, sometimes as late as adolescence.

A third or more of the human cortex is concerned with vision, and if visual input is suddenly lost, very extensive reorganizations and remappings may occur in the cerebral cortex, with the development, sometimes, of intermodal sensations of all sorts. There is much evidence, from Pascual-Leone and his colleagues as well as others,
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to show that in those born blind or early blinded, the massive visual cortex, far from remaining functionless, is reallocated to other sensory inputs, especially hearing and touch, and becomes specialized for the processing of these.
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Even when blindness begins later in life, such reallocation can occur. Nadine Gaab et al., in their study of one late-blinded musician with absolute pitch, were able to show extensive activation of both visual-association areas while he listened to music.

Frédéric Gougoux, Robert Zatorre, and others in Montreal have shown that “blind people are better than sighted controls at judging the direction of pitch change between sounds, even when the speed of change is ten times faster than that perceived by controls— but only if they became blind at an early age.” A tenfold difference here is extraordinary— one does not usually encounter a whole order of magnitude difference in a basic perceptual capacity.

The exact neural correlates underlying musical skills in the blind have not yet been fully defined, but are being intensively studied in Montreal and elsewhere.

In the meantime, we have only the iconic image of the blind musician, the large numbers of blind musicians in the world, descriptions of the frequent musicality of blind children, and personal memoirs. One of the most beautiful of these is the autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, a writer and hero of the French Resistance who was gifted musically and played the cello as a boy even before being blinded at the age of seven. In his memoir,
And There Was Light,
he emphasized the immense importance of music for him after he lost his sight:

F
or centuries, humans have searched for a relationship between music and color. Newton thought that the spectrum had seven discrete colors, corresponding in some unknown but simple way to the seven notes of the diatonic scale. “Color organs” and similar instruments, in which each note would be accompanied by a specific color, go back to the early eighteenth century. And there are no less than eighteen densely packed columns on “Colour and Music” in
The Oxford Companion to Music.
For most of us, the association of color and music is at the level of metaphor. “Like” and “as if” are the hallmarks of such metaphors. But for some people one sensory experience may instantly and automatically provoke another. For a true synesthete, there is no “as if”— simply an instant conjoining of sensations. This may involve any of the senses— for example, one person may perceive individual letters or days of the week as having their own particular colors; another may feel that every color has its own peculiar smell, or every musical interval its own taste.
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One of the first systematic accounts of synesthesia (as this was dubbed in the 1890s) was provided by Francis Galton in his classic 1883
Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
— an eccentric and wide-ranging book which included his discovery of the individuality of fingerprints, his use of composite photography, and, most notoriously, his thoughts on eugenics.
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Galton’s studies of “mental imagery” started with an inquiry into people’s abilities to visualize scenes, faces, and so on in vivid, veridical detail, and then proceeded to their imagery of numbers. Some of Galton’s subjects, to his astonishment, said they invariably “saw” particular numerals— whether they were actually looking at them or even imagining them— in a particular color, always the same color. Though Galton at first thought of this as no more than an “association,” he soon became convinced that it was a physiological phenomenon, a specific and innate faculty of mind with some kinship to mental imagery but more fixed, more stereotyped and automatic in nature, and, in contrast to other forms of mental imagery, virtually impossible to influence by consciousness or will.

Until recently, I had rarely had occasion, as a neurologist, to see anyone with synesthesia— for synesthesia is not something that brings patients to neurologists. Some estimate the incidence of synesthesia to be about one in two thousand, but it may be considerably more common, since most people who have it do not consider it to be a “condition.” They have always been this way, and they assume, until they learn to the contrary, that what they experience is perfectly normal and usual, that everyone experiences fusions of different senses as they do. Thus I have recently discovered, simply by asking, that several patients whom I have been seeing for other conditions, sometimes for years, are in fact synesthetes as well. They had simply never thought to mention it, and I had never asked.

For many years, the only patient I knew to be a synesthete was a painter who suddenly became totally colorblind following a head injury.
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He lost not only the ability to perceive or even imagine color, but also the automatic seeing of color with music which he had had all his life. Though this was, in a sense, the least of his losses, it was nevertheless a significant one, for music had always been “enriched,” as he put it, by the colors that accompanied it.

This persuaded me that synesthesia was a physiological phenomenon, dependent on the integrity of certain areas of the cortex and the connections between them— in his case, between specific areas in the visual cortex needed to construct the perception or imagery of color. The destruction of these areas in this man had left him unable to experience
any
color, including “colored” music.

Of all the different forms of synesthesia, musical synesthesia— especially color effects experienced while listening to or thinking of music— is one of the most common, and perhaps the most dramatic. We do not know if it is more common in musicians or musical people, but musicians are, of course, more likely to be aware of it, and many of the people who have recently described their musical synesthesias to me have been musicians.

T
HE EMINENT
contemporary composer Michael Torke has been deeply influenced by experiences with colored music. Torke showed striking musical gifts at an early age, and when he was five he was given a piano, and a piano teacher. “I was already a composer at five,” he says— his teacher would divide pieces into sections, and Michael would rearrange the sections in different orders as he played.

One day he remarked to his teacher, “I love that blue piece.”

His teacher was not sure she had heard correctly: “Blue?”

“Yes,” said Michael, “the piece in D major…D major is blue.”

“Not for me,” the teacher replied. She was puzzled, and Michael, too, for he assumed that
everyone
saw colors associated with musical keys. When he began to realize that not everyone shared this synesthesia, he had difficulty imagining what that would be like. He thought it would amount to “a sort of blindness.”

Michael has had this kind of key synesthesia— seeing fixed colors associated with the playing of music, scales, arpeggios, anything with a key signature— as far back as he can remember. He has always had absolute pitch, too, as far as he knows. This in itself makes musical keys absolutely distinctive for him: G-sharp minor, for example, has a different “flavor” from G minor, he says, in the same way that major and minor keys have different qualities for the rest of us. Indeed, he says, he cannot imagine having key synesthesia without having absolute pitch. Each key, each mode, for him,
looks
as distinctive (and as “characteristic”) as it sounds.

The colors have been constant and fixed since his earliest years, and they appear spontaneously. No effort of will or imagination can change them. They seem completely natural to him, and preordained. The colors are highly specific. G minor, for example, is not just “yellow,” but “ochre” or “gamboge.” D minor is “like flint, graphite” F minor is “earthy, ashy.” He struggles to find the right word, as he would struggle to find the right paint or crayon.

The colors of major and minor keys are always related (for instance, G minor is a subdued yellow ochre, G major bright yellow), but otherwise he is hard put to find any system or rule by which the colors of particular keys might be predicted. At one time, he wondered whether the colors had been suggested by actual associations when he was very young— a toy piano, perhaps, with each key a different color— but he has no clear memories of any such thing. He feels, in any case, that there are far too many color associations (fourteen for the major and minor keys, another half dozen for the modes, as a start) to make such an explanation likely. Moreover, some keys seem to have strange hues which he can hardly describe, and which he has almost never seen in the world about him.
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When I asked Michael in what sense he “saw” his colors, he spoke of their luminosity. The colors had a sort of transparent, luminous brilliance, he said, “like a screen” before him, but they in no way occluded or altered his normal vision. What would happen, I asked, if he saw a D-major “blue” while looking at a yellow wall— would he see green? No, he replied; his synesthetic colors were wholly inward and never confused with external colors. Yet subjectively, they were very intense and “real.”

The colors he sees with musical keys have been absolutely fixed and consistent for forty years or more, and he wonders whether they were present at birth, or determined when he was a newborn. Others have tested the accuracy and consistency of his color-key associations over time, and they have not changed.

He sees no colors associated with isolated notes or different pitches. Nor will he see color if, say, a fifth is played— for a fifth, as such, is ambiguous, not associated with a particular key. There needs to be a major or minor triad or a succession of notes sufficient to indicate the basic key signature. “Everything goes back to the tonic,” he says. Context, however, is also important; thus Brahms’s Second Symphony is in D major (blue), but one movement is in G minor (ochre). This movement will still be blue if played in the context of the whole symphony, but it may be ochre if he reads, plays, or imagines it separately.