music-colour synaesthesia revisited

My post on music-colour synaesthesia has been the most visited item on my blog, and has also become the most interesting area of synaesthesia to me recently.

I have been, for a while, fairly convinced that I have grapheme-colour synaesthesia (I see words, numbers, names as colours) and nothing else. But since taking a synesthesia quiz which involved a section on music, where I scored quite highly for syn in some of the musical areas, I have started to think more and more about music-colour synaesthesia.

I have come to believe that in certain circumstances I DO actually experience synaesthetic perceptions in music, but that I had never really noticed before. But since I only see colours in my mind’s eye rather than actually SEEING them in front of my eyes, it is difficult to determine what causes the occasional synaesthesia responses.

A lot of the time, it is just the name of the song or artist that provides the overall colour of the song, which would still make it grapheme-colour synaesthesia. For example, the song ‘Peach, Plum, Pear’ by Joanna Newsom is a deep purply colour and I can only assume I am seeing a plum colour (although I am still unaware as to why plum would stand out more than peach or pear). But while listening to Anxiety Attack by Jeffrey Lewis I started to see flashing black and pink spots in the intro to the song.

I thought it was quite interesting, but I am still not sure what to make of it. It just seems, as usual, to be a useless quirk that doesn’t really mean anything. I still like it though.

music colour synaesthesia

One type of synaesthesia is music colour synaesthesia, where a note, key or certain quality in music causes the synaesthete to experience colour. Some music color synesthetes find the colours they see in music to be so distracting they can’t work while listening to music.

I find this fascinating because I don’t possess this kind of synaesthesia.

As a grapheme synaesthete, I do have colour responses to music but in a completely different way. For example, if I know the name of the song, then the song will be whichever colour I experience for the name (currently I’m listening to Sawdust and Diamonds by Joanna Newsom which is a lovely bright yellow for the whole 10 minutes of this epic song).

I am a very musical person (I play the piano, alto saxophone, surdo drum [brazilian] and a bit of clarinet, guitar and banjo) so in learning to read music I also had colour responses to keys and the letters of the notes if I knew which ones were being played, plus the instrument itself, because all instrument, like all words, have colours too.

Also, major and minor keys have an impact on the colours I perceive – minor keys generally add a black/grey/brown tinge to the letter of the key.

Although all this extra colour information is going on in my head it’s not overwhelming or distracting, it’s just there without intruding which is pretty lucky I guess.