What is synesthesia?
Synesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.
On Saturday, Alyssa and I watched a British documentary about synesthesia. It was very interesting. It got me thinking about my own synesthesia once again. It was interesting because for most people who have colors and music intertwined like myself, they picture the notes going gradually from dark for low notes to brighter for higher notes. I found that off, as that’s not how it is at all with me. For me, each note/chord/key signature has its own distinct color and there’s no real progression from one to another. For example, A is red and Bb is magenta. But then, out of nowhere, there’s B which is green and C which is blue. So I think my particular sound-to-color synesthesia is more similar to grapheme-to-color synesthesia, where people associate colors with certain letters and numbers with no gradual progression in color. But I don’t associate colors with letters at all unless they are referring to music.
Certain songs where I know the key or overriding tonality are a very distinct color for me. The more I know the song, the more I see the color(s). So, like, with my own songs I see the colors very strongly (“Soldier Down” is very blue and “Surgeon” is very yellow). Same with bands I am obsessed with. For example, “Strawberry Fields Forever” is a pinkish song to me because it’s in Bb. “Penny Lane” is green because it’s in B.
For songs where I don’t know immediately what the notes involved are, my mind will still grasp at a color just as my mind is also unconsciously trying to figure out the notes, chords, etc. For example, the song “Someday” off the new Tegan & Sara album immediately jumped out at me as a magenta/purpleish song the first time I heard it, so I thought it was in either Bb or Eb. But when I sat down to figure it out, it turned out to be in C, which is blue. So I was somewhat close, but now that I know it’s in C, the song appears more blue to me (but with purple around the edges maybe). A color really isn’t associated with music until my mind knows the corresponding notes. But since I have sorta-perfect pitch I can often pick up the notes/colors pretty quickly.
Some notes/chords/keys are stronger than others. A, Bb, B, C, D, Eb, F, F# are all easy for me to spot. But E, G, G#, C# can be sometimes harder to grasp the colors because they can change depending on context. For example, E can be either blue or green depending on the song. It’s kind of annoying. But it’s never anything other than those two colors. There’s also a lightness difference between major and minor chords. F major is bright white whereas F minor is gray. B major is bright green whereas B minor is a forest green.
Occasionally, when I’m writing a song I’ll change the key because I don’t think the color I’m writing in matches the song. When I was writing “Coldplay Got Eaten By Piranhas,” I started writing it in Eb (light purple). I briefly considered changing it to E (green in this case) because it fit my vocal range a bit better, but I decided that it just didn’t work as a green song. It needed to be purple. Green just felt wrong for it. Also, I wrote the chorus of “Bad Vibrations” in A because it’s a bright red, and I wanted a bold, bright feel for it.
I tend to gravitate to keys that I can see easily (not many in G, G# and C#) and that have a warm feel to them. F major is a somewhat cold white to me, so I don’t have as many songs in F. But B major is my favorite in large part because it’s a warm yet bright green. But of course the color aspect is always secondary to the sound aspect. The colors are just an added bonus, like X-ray specs in my Rice Krispies.
Also: when synesthetes say they “see” colors, they don’t mean they literally hallucinate them. That would be insanely distracting and no one would be able to function like that. The colors happen in the mind’s eye or the imagination, whatever you want to call it. It’s no different than a non-synesthete picturing the color red. It’s just that music (or whatever) makes a synesthete picture colors involuntarily. There’s no way I can not picture red when I hear or think of A major.
Cool/weird eh?!
Here’s a list of my note/color correlations:
A – Red
Bb – Magenta/Pink
B – Green
C – Blue
C# – Cyan
D – Yellow
Eb – Magenta/Purple
E – Blue/Green
F – White
F# – Gold
G – Yellow/Orange-Ish
G# – Cyan
