Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (20 page)

He particularly liked Mozart and Vivaldi as a boy, above all for their use of keys, which, he says, was “pure, narrow…they used a simpler palette.” Later, in adolescence, he became enamored of Chopin, Schumann, the Romantic composers— though, with their convoluted modulations, they made special demands on his synesthesia.

Michael does not have any color associations with musical pattern or texture, rhythm, instruments, composers, mood, or emotion— only with key. He does, however, have other sorts of nonmusical synesthesia. For him, letters, numbers, and days of the week all have their own particular colors, and a peculiar topography or landscape as well.
5

I asked Michael what role, if any, his musical synesthesia played in his creative life, whether it took his thinking and imagination in unexpected directions.
6
There was an explicit connection, he answered, between color and key in the first orchestral music he wrote, a series of five pieces called
Color Music
in which each piece explored the musical possibilities of a single key— and thus a single color. The first of these pieces was entitled “Ecstatic Orange” the others were “Bright Blue Music,” “Green,” “Purple,” and “Ash.” But apart from these early pieces, Michael has never again made explicit use of his key synesthesia in his work— a remarkable and ever-expanding range of music which now includes operas, ballets, and symphonic pieces. He is frequently asked whether synesthesia has made much difference to his life, especially as a professional musician. He says, “For me, at least, it’s no big deal.” For him, it is normal and completely unremarkable.

D
AVID CALDWELL
, another composer, also has musical synesthesia, but of a distinctly different sort. When I mentioned Michael’s equation of yellow with G major to him, he exclaimed, “That seems wrong to me!” So too was Michael’s green for E major, and indeed most of Michael’s colors (although, David said, he could see the “logic” of some of them). Every synesthete has his own color correspondences.

Color-key association goes both ways for David; seeing a piece of transparent golden-yellow glass on my windowsill put him in mind of B-flat major. (“Something clear and golden about that key,” he said. Was it, he wondered, the color of brass? Trumpets, he said, are B-flat instruments, and a lot of brass music is written in this key.) He is not sure what determines his particular colors: Have they arisen from experience, by conventional association? Are they arbitrary? Have they any “meaning”?

While David does not have perfect pitch, he has excellent relative pitch. He remembers accurately the pitch of many songs and many instruments, and can immediately infer from this what key any piece is played in. Each key, he says, “has its own quality”— and each key also has its own individual color.

David feels that the color of music is central to his musical sensibility and musical thought, for it is not just keys that have distinctive colors; musical themes, patterns, ideas, and moods have colors too, as do particular instruments and parts for them. Synesthetic colors accompany every stage of his musical thinking; his groping for “the underlying structure of things” is facilitated by color, and he knows he is on course, that he is achieving his goal, when the synesthetic colors seem right. Color flavors and enriches and, above all, clarifies his musical thinking. But it is difficult to pin down or systematize his correspondences. When I asked him to make a chart of his synesthetic colors, he thought for a few days and then wrote to me:

Gian Beeli, Michaela Esslen, and Lutz Jäncke, researchers in Zurich, have described a professional musician with both music-color and music-taste synesthesia: “Whenever she hears a specific musical interval, she automatically experiences a taste on her tongue that is consistently linked to that musical interval.” In a 2005 article in
Nature,
they detailed her associations:

Minor second

Major second

Minor third

Major third

Fourth

Tritone

Fifth

Minor sixth

Major sixth

Minor seventh

Major seventh

Octave

Any auditory uncertainty as to what musical interval she is hearing is immediately compensated for by its “taste,” for her musical-synesthetic tastes are instantaneous, automatic, and always correct. I have also heard of violinists who make use of synesthesia to tune their instruments, and piano tuners who find it useful in their work.

C
HRISTINE LEAHY,
a writer, visual artist, and guitar player, has strong synesthesia for letters, numbers, and days of the week, as well as a strong, though less specific, color synesthesia for music. Her letter chromesthesia is especially strong, and if a word begins with a “red” letter, for example, its redness may spread to involve the whole word.
7

Christine does not have absolute pitch and cannot perceive any intrinsic difference between different keys. But the color concomitants of letters also apply to the letters of the musical scale, so that if she knows that a particular note is D, it will elicit a sensation of greenness as vivid as that of the letter
D.
This synesthesia applies also to the sound of the note. She described the following color sensations when tuning her guitar, bringing a string down from E (blue) to D (green): “Rich, saturated blue…blue fading out, it seems grainier…a textured and unsaturated green…a smooth, pure, rich green.”

I asked about what happened, visually, with the semitone, the E-flat, between E and D, and she said, “Nothing; it’s a blank.” None of the sharps or flats have color concomitants for her, though she perceives them and plays them without any difficulty. When she plays a diatonic scale— the scale of C major— she sees a “rainbow” of colors in spectral order, each color “dissolving” into the next. But when she plays a chromatic scale, the colors are interrupted by a series of “blanks.” She ascribes this to the fact that when she was very young, she learned the alphabet by means of colored letter magnets on the refrigerator. These were organized in groups of seven (A to G, H to N, etc.), their colors corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow, but there was nothing, of course, corresponding to sharps or flats in these letters.
8

She regards her musical synesthesia as an enhancement or enrichment of music, even though it may have initially had a linguistic rather than a musical origin. She was aghast when I told her the story of the colorblind painter and how he had lost his musical synesthesia when he became colorblind. She would be “stricken,” she said, if she were to lose hers— it would be “like losing a sense.”

P
ATRICK EHLEN
is a psychologist and songwriter who has very extensive synesthesia— not only to music but to sounds of all sorts, from musical instruments to car horns, voices, animal noises, thunder— so that the world of sound is continuously transformed into a flowing world of colors and shapes. He also has color synesthesia to letters, numbers, and days of the week. He remembers how his first-grade teacher, seeing him staring into space, asked what he was looking at. He replied that he was “counting the colors till Friday.” The whole class burst into laughter, and thereafter he kept such matters to himself.

It was only when he was eighteen, in a chance conversation with a fellow student, that he heard the term “synesthesia”— and realized that what he had always had, and had always taken for granted, was in fact “a condition.” His curiosity aroused, he began reading about synesthesia, and thought about writing his dissertation on the subject. He feels that his synesthesia moved him to become a psychologist, though his professional work has been in other realms— speech, discourse, linguistics— and not in synesthesia.

Some of his synesthetic correspondences are of mnemonic use to him (thus when someone said that 9/11 was a Monday, he could instantly and with assurance say that it was not, for Tuesday is yellow for him, and 9/11 is yellow too). But it is the musical synesthesia which plays a vital part in his sensibility and his creative life.

Patrick does not experience, like Michael Torke, a fixed relation between color and key (this seems to be a relatively rare form of musical synesthesia, perhaps because it demands absolute pitch too). Synesthesia, for Patrick, is evoked by virtually every other aspect of music: its rhythm and tempo, the shapes of melodies, their modulation into different keys, the richness of harmonies, the timbre of different instruments, and, especially, the overall character and mood of what he is hearing. Listening to music for Patrick is immensely enhanced— never occluded or distracted— by the rich stream of visual sensations that accompany it.

But it is in composing, above all, that he values his synesthesia. Patrick has songs, fragments of songs, and ideas for songs continually running through his head, and his synesthesia is crucial for their realization, an integral part of the creative process. The very concept of music, for him, is infused with the visual. Color is not “added” to music, it is integral to it. He only wishes that others could share this totality, and he tries to suggest it, he says, as fully as he can, in his own songs.

S
UE B.,
another synesthete, seems to experience musical synesthesia not so much with color as with light, shape, and position. She describes her experience this way:

T
HE HISTORY OF
scientific interest in synesthesia has gone through many vicissitudes. In the early nineteenth century, when Keats and Shelley and other poets used extravagant intersensory images and metaphors, it seemed that synesthesia was no more than a poetic or imaginative conceit. Then came a series of careful psychological studies in the 1860s and 1870s, culminating in Galton’s
Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
in 1883. These served to legitimate the phenomenon and were soon followed by the introduction of the word “synesthesia.” Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with Rimbaud and the Symbolist poets, the notion of synesthesia again seemed a poetic conceit, and it ceased to be regarded as a subject for scientific investigation.
9
This changed yet again in the last third of the twentieth century, as John Harrison details in his excellent book
Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing.
In the 1980s, Richard Cytowic made the first neurophysiological studies of synesthetic subjects— studies that, for all their technical limitations, seemed to show a genuine activation of different sensory areas in the brain (e.g., auditory and visual) coincident with synesthetic experiences. In 1989, he published a pioneering text,
Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses,
and this was followed by a popular exploration of the subject in 1993,
The Man Who Tasted Shapes.
Current techniques of functional brain imaging now give unequivocal evidence for the simultaneous activation or coactivation of two or more sensory areas of the cerebral cortex in synesthetes, just as Cytowic’s work had predicted.