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Hate to tell you but I've seen colors with music my whole life. I'm playing Debussy's reverie (excuse spelling) again and I see certain colors everytime I come to a group of chords. Actually, the brass on the piano lock reflects theses colors when I play! Ok, feel free to roll your eyes and commment on the fact I'm from California!

I just don't think it's bull.....can't spell baloney!

Hey CB, I don't see them myself but knew a gal who did and she could play circles around me. Everyone's wired differently thank goodness.

Most of the people who have synesthesia report it from such an early age that they would also qualify as prodigies in prevarication for them to be making it up. I think some people are born with it. Not me.

Ok. I have no reason to believe you are making this up. You are not a famous composer or pianist that has peer pressure to have this disorder.



Since I'm pretty scientific, and I have quite an open mind, and I must take this opportunity to ask a few questions because I'm extremely curious!

Also, maybe people misunderstand my original post. This condition is rare, the post is regarding the peer pressure of what I think is a large percentage of people faking this condition to appear as if they have a superhuman innate relationship with sounds and music. That's the balagne!

I'm being sincere, not condescending:

So g major has a very specific "very green" color. I understand that there are enough variations of shades of color to cover every chord imaginable.

My question is this. If your piano was tuned sharp, so a g major was tuned 1/4 step high, would it still be green? Brighter?
Is there a progressional relationship?

Is the next major chord g sharp major still some shade of green or can it get to red all the sudden?

Do minor chords have their own separate colors? G minor some shade of green or is it a completely different color??

Is it always consistent? Do you ever hear a g major and see a different color?

Does it take time for the color to appear? If I played quick major chords in a chromatic scaled, g, g sharp, a, a sharp would the colors appear that quickly and disappear?

Do the colors appear more beautiful when beautiful music is played?
If you could somehow not hear the sound, but only see the colors, would you be able to distinct one piece from another? Would a melodic piece display better color progression than random bashing on a piano by a 5 year old?

Do you feel that seeing colors is an advantage?

When you hear a composer who wrote in "colors" due to them having the same condition, does their music stand out as "speaking to you" in ways that non color composition can't like Chopin, or Beethoven, or Schubert?

Sorry for all the questions.

Sounds like you need to organize a testing synesthesia protocol Noambenhamou. They are good questions. To answer them scientifically would take a solid amount of work.

Can I add a few questions

* Suppose we have a a standard repeating cadence C-F-G-C. Are you then seeing flashing colors white-orange-green-white repeating? Sounds pretty tiring to me
* If a string orchestra plays C chord, do you also see that as white? organ?
* What if we have a glissando on the violin?
* Does the whole environment color that way, like you are looking through colored glasses?

noambenhamou

he already wrote that C major is white, C minor black. guess that answers one of your questions

Sorry. Missed that.

Good addition to questions though.

One more. Do the colors disrupt your actual seeing? Like wouter79 mentioned. If I'm playing the piano and my white cat walks by, and I look at him while playing g major, will he turn green like looking through a green glass?
I imagine it would be maybe spots of green in the pariferal vision like when you get dizzy you see stars.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't think anyone is asking in a condescending manner. We are just curious.

I was guessing you didn't fly for an airline, but was curious since your linked website says you wrote this about ten years ago:

• Currently studying to be a commercial pilot. I hold a private pilot certificate with an instrument rating. Big news! I just received my Commercial Pilot / Multi-engine rating!!!!!!!!

The guy who wrote the above was clearly excited about the prospect of being a commercial pilot. So I was just curious if you were successful--ten years would certainly have been enough time.

My dad and grandfather were both Navy pilots. My brother and I didn't have the requisite 20/20 vision to follow in their footsteps. My brother spent years and lots of resources trying to accumulate all the ratings necessary to be a commercial pilot, and did, but no one ever paid him to fly. Fortunately, he had a solid education and good jobs anyway, and the flying thing ended up being just an expensive hobby. The reality is that the aviation industry is not kind to those who pursue training on their own. Why should they be, when they can get expert pilots, with thousands of hours of jet-engine flight time and millions of dollars of training (at tax payer expense) from the military? This dynamic has been in play since long before 9/11.

Anyway, sounds like the ROI on your computer training was greater than on your aviation training.

I watched a documentary about synasthesia a few years ago. Fascinating stuff and definitely not bologna!
One person would taste words. The word money conjured up the taste of bacon for example.
Another person would see musical notes as coloured bars in front of her!
The brain is a wonderful and largely unexplored organ!

Cool story! Thanks for sharing.


As usual, I agree with Rich's observations. Last night, after I read this, I was thinking like an engineer. Light is made up of waves, and colors are specific frequencies of those waves. Music is made up of notes, and notes are specific pitches, which are also frequencies of vibration. It seems plausible to me that some people might pick up on harmonics, overtones and undertones and perceive or correlate them to colors. We even talk about music in terms of color sometimes, 'blue' for example. Certain music can make the listener feel a certain way, happy, sad, etc. So perhaps it affects people in other subtle ways too, especially those who may be more attune to different senses than most of us are.

At the same time, I agree with Noam's observation that sometimes creative people will make preposterous claims as a way to try to set themselves apart from others.

Don't know if it is off-topic but when I read the thread I thought that this would be interesting ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_mmwrbDGac I knew that man personally a year or two ago while we were shooting.

I'm from a long line of people with what is now known as synesthesia. In my family it was/is called sensory interference.

My mother and daughter both see specific colors associated with tone. Neither plays a musical instrument but say the color association helps keep them "in tune" when singing.

I see visual interference patterns in music. Composers tend to repeat patterns. It is an interesting effect but of little musical use other than in guessing who wrote a piece never heard before. Sometimes the overlap is problematic. I will not listen to music if I'm driving when tired as light patterns will superimpose into my field of vision.

You said that you commonly imagine visual "scenes" of piano pieces. "A lonely child, or someone kicking the crap out of someone in a battle". I never imagine anything like that so to me that sounds as much hooey as the colors seem to you.

Yes, sensory overlap occurs in some brains. Is it fun, useful or interesting as the Internet makes it out to be? I very much doubt it.

Thank you! You reminded me where I heard about synaesthesia. It was also a TED talk, but a different speaker. This is the same neurologist, Ramachandran, of the pdf I attached earlier. This TED clip is actually VERY interesting. His main message was about how he helped soldiers coming back form Iraq that had limbs amputated and were suffering from pains in their phantom limb(s). It is very interesting and if you can spare 20 minutes I would watch it, otherwise, save it on InstaPaper for later.

But the particular part where he talks about synaesthesia is around 17:30.

http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html

The writer Vladimir Nabokov and his mother both saw letters as having colors, but couldn't agree on which colors went with which letters.

When I first read about how Mozart saw different keys in different colors, I felt like I must be missing out on a big part if his music. However, since synesthetes don't see or experience the overlapping senses the same way, nobody has the same experience that Mozart had. Any aspect of his composing that that involved those colors was something that only he experienced. Others may see different colors, but that is their own unique experience.

For me, all chords have their own colour. For example, B dim. is pale green with little purple fleurs-de-lis, Eb+5 is navy blue with a silver edge and C11 is a sort of burned umber with diagonal orange stripes.

Not only that but there are fairies at the bottom of my garden and they are different colours on different days of the week.

In any color scheme I've seen on this, C is always red. The other notes and colors seem to be randomly paired but C is always red. Anybody know or guess why?

Most blues are traditionally In F or Bb yet I've never seen either of these notes coloured blue.

I think this kind of argumentation "everything is a wave" is grossly misleading to plain wrong. Sound waves and electromagnetic waves are very different in nature, in way they propagate, requirements for propagation, speed of the wave, what the wave actually is, etc. Then, our brains do not process waves. They operate on impulses. People arguing this way usually do not unddrstand waves at all, they are just repeating this argument from someone else.

But there might be something similar in the way the brain processs these waves.

stripes? fleur-de-lis? You see patterns, not just colors?

Is it like looking through a colored glass?

Are all 11 chords stripes?