The Wonders of Seeing Color in Tones: Chromesthesia
Franz Liszt, a famous composer and pianist was known for telling his orchestra to play the piece quoting “ ‘O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please!” or “that is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!”. The term synesthesia was not widely used during Liszt’s era; however this is a clear indication that Liszt evoked music synesthesia by seeing more than just tones; Liszt was seeing color in tones, a type of synesthesia called chromesthesia (Mahling, 1926).
Despite this, how chromesthesia or in general, synesthesia works is still novel and many questions still continue to be asked like how exactly does synesthesia have an impact on musical perception?
In 1895, Mary Whiton Calkins coined the term “synesthesia” in one of her articles stating that synesthesia describes a wide range of synesthetic experiences (Johnson & Bruckmann, 2023). In other words, it is the phenomenon of one perceived sense being linked to another, unrelated sense. The triggering stimulus is known as the inducer, so in this case the music while the resulting synesthetic experience of the inducer, the concurrent would be experiencing color (Jewanski, et al., 2020).
A possible explanation for chromesthesia is a cross-modal association learned earlier in life by associating pitches with colors in a repeated fashion. For example, if a child experienced playing a piano with colored keys associated with a pitch. This corresponds to the fact that chromesthesia is more prevalent among children than adults as they experience such associations at a younger age (Rogers, 1987).
A similar study that supported this theory was conducted where 18 participants were drawn from the population of staff and music students within the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (MCM) at the University of Melbourne. The following table briefly lists each participant’s musical background with demographic information. The “SYN” column indicates that all of the participants had experienced some kind of synesthesia and the AP column indicates which participants have absolute pitch. The participants completed an online survey, The Synesthesia Test, where participants are asked to match colors to musical tones. This task was repeated in a randomized manner for three trials for each type of synesthesia (Glasser, 2023).
The results below indicate that musical note-color, or chromesthesia were among the most common types of synesthesia experienced among the musicians who had begun their musical skills from an early age (Glasser, 2023).
To further emphasize the idea of chromesthesia among individuals, two of the individuals listed in the first table were described in a case study that revealed that Ethan possessed sound–color synesthesia and described D major as yellow whereas Charlotte described C major as yellow instead. The variations of this were indicated to be due to personal experiences that shaped how they associated the tone with the color (Glasser, 2023).
Other studies also had varied results that indicated that sound-to-color associations were not the same among individuals. A 2022 study by Spence and Di Stefano that compared the color associations between two famous composers discovered quite different results:
The above results comparing color-sound correspondences on a chromatic scale seem to clash with one another in the sense that Rimsky-Korsakov indicates that C major is white while Scriabin associates C major with red (Spence & Di Stefano, 2022). The question arises after all of this research; why?
Relating this back to the case study about Ethan and Charlotte, we can see that the above table comparing color-sound correspondances have some similarities to their synesthetic experiences. In particular, Ethan’s experience that D major is yellow with yellow flowers associated with it which correlates to Scriabin and Rimsky-Korasov’s color association with D major. However, Charlotte’s associated C major with yellow which neither composer had corresponded to. Overall, it seems that there isn’t a clear color-sound correspondence as a group but rather a unique experience for each individual (Glasser, 2023).
To highlight this result in another way, a study of 28 participants, ages 15–47 years old with musical training since ages 5–8 and absolute pitch involved them listening to chord structures (major & minor) to the initial theme of Bach’s Preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier. From their Figure 1, participants experienced mainly blue or green when listening for F major chord which aligned with Rimsky-Korasov’s correspondances. The results shown in their Figure 3 aligned with both Scriabin and Rimsky-Korasov’s color associations.
The results indicated a predominance of light blue/dark green colors when listening to F and F sharp major chord, which seems to correspond to both Scriabin and Rimsky-Korasov’s color association as well, though the E flat major chord (not depicted here) was mostly perceived as orange which does not align. Thus, it can be said that there is no clear standard for chromesthesia in regards to which color is associated with what key. It is implied that individual experiences and associations shape how one perceives color in musical tone as well as potential, underlying cognitively or neurologically correlated instances that still need to be investigated in future studies (Petrovic et al., 2012).
To see if you potentially have synesthesia, try out the Synesthesia Test; https://synesthete.ircn.jp/home!
References:
Glasser, S. (2023). The Relationship Between Music-Related Types of Synesthesia and Mental Imagery in Synesthete Musicians. Music & Science, 6. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043231173810
Jewanski, J., Simner, J., Day, S. A., Rothen, N., & Ward, J. (2020). The “golden age” of synesthesia inquiry in the late nineteenth century (1876–1895). Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 29(2), 175–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/0964704X.2019.1636348
Mahling, F. (1926). Das Problem der ‘Audition colorée’ : Eine hist. -krit. Untersuchung. Germany: Akad. Verlag Ges..
Petrovic, M., Antovic, M., Milankovic, V., & Acic, G. (2012). Interplay of Tone and Color: Absolute Pitch and Synesthesia. http://icmpc-escom2012.web.auth.gr/files/papers/799_Proc.pdf
Rogers, G. L. (1987). Four Cases of Pitch-Specific Chromesthesia in Trained Musicians with Absolute Pitch. Psychology of Music, 15(2), 198–207. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735687152007
Spence, C., & Di Stefano, N. (2022). Coloured hearing, colour music, colour organs, and the search for perceptually meaningful correspondences between colour and sound. i-Perception, 13(3), 20416695221092802. https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695221092802
