Synesthesia, Colour Hearing & Electronic Music

I thought with this post I'd have an extended look a the relationship between synesthesia and electronic music. So first up let's look at this short clip explaining was synesthesia is and how it affects a persons understanding of music.

What is synesthesia? Synesthesia is a neurological condition where two or more senses become conjoined. Typical synesthetic's see numbers and letters as having colours, or the sounds of words evoking tastes. Using neuroimaging or CT Scans scientists can see the separate areas of the brain, such as the centre for sight and sound, are active when a synesthetic sees a letter or number. This means when a synesthetic sees a number or letter or hears a sound it evokes joined sensations such that they can hear colour, see sound or taste words.

The numbers given for people with synesthesia seem to vary fairly widely. They range from one in every 2000 to one in every 100 or 1% of the population. Professor Daphne Maurer of McMaster University’s department of psychology has found that at one time we all lived in a world in which sights had sounds and feelings had taste. At the annual meeting of the American Synesthesia Association November 6, Maurer discussed evidence that all infants are synesthetic.

“Toddlers perceive higher pitched sounds to come from white balls and lower pitched sounds to come from black balls, just like adults with synesthesia,” explains Maurer. “With development, the connections underlying synesthesia are inhibited in most individuals.” - link

So what has this to do with electronic music? Well I can make some tenuous links by looking at the early instigators of electronic music - proto-electronic music if you like. The Futurist movement, as most of you probably know, is credited with starting the artistic movement that led to electronic music. Futurists advocated the use of new instrumentation, the rejection of traditional scales and notation and the introduction of noise into music.

The picture across was painted by Luigi Russulo one of the founding fathers of the Futurist movement and author of The Art of Noises. "Russolo's painting might suggest a belief in correspondences of colour to music. The clearest clue is provided in a manifesto on "The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells", by his comrade Carlo Carrà: - "...rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut, greeeeeeeeeeeens that screeeeeeam, yellows, as violent as can be.". link

Also the form or shape that the music takes in Russulo's painting is quite interesting. It adheres to one of Heinrick Kluver's basic visual patterns. In 1926 Heinrick Kluver carried out experiments on candidates using mescaline. He was interested in categorising the various hallucinations into groups of related visual patterns. He found all the visions fit one or more of four possible forms tunnels and cones, grids and crosshatchings, central radiations and spirals.

This is remarkably similar to how many synesthetics see music. According to Richard E. Cytowic, one of the leading researchers in synesthesia, "When a synesthetic listens to music they don't see a pastoral landscape with sheep gambling through it. They see geometric shapes zig zags, grids, blobs, angular forms." When looked at in this way we can see that one of earliest creative aesthetics in electronic music was driven from the point of view of colour hearing or Sound Art.

A basic introduction into how this might look can be seen in the video clip Synesthesia Synthesizer - thanks to somesecret



Another link I can find between synesthesia and the early development of electronic music is in the work and musical methodologies of Olivier Messiaen. It is difficult to overstate Messiaen's influence on early electronic composers. He was one of the first modern composers to incorporate electronic instrumentation into orchestral music, using the Ondes Martenot in Turangalîla-Symphonie. He taught Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and for a brief period Iannis Xenakis. Also i've often thought that his idea's on serial music and tone rows can be seen as early examples of sequencing; copying basic patterns, reversing them, turning them upside down, randomizing them. Messiaen had synesthesia and often talked about the relationship between sound and colour.

"Messiaen had synesthesia that worked in both directions. Usually it's a one way street, so it's sound to vision. But Messiaen when he saw colours he heard music and when he heard music he saw colours. So when he was commissioned to write 'Des Canyons aux Etoiles' or 'From the Canyon to the Stars' he was in Bryce canyon and he said ' my eyes went up the coloured cliffs of the wall and the music just wrote itself'.

He invented that whole system of modes of limited transposition to convey the colour of the chords... In Messiaen's (mind) it's the vertical intervals between the notes (that triggers colour) that's why you have all those big chord clusters in him and that produces the colour." - Richard E. Cytowic

Synesthesia has been found to be more prevalent in creative people. Obviously people who can see, as well as hear music are much more likely to be musicians than those who can't. So it would be incorrect to claim that the link between colour and sound is unique to electronic music. It might be possible to say it is more fundamental to electronic music.

I can make other links between synesthesia and electronic music like Iannis Xenakis' connection with Kalindinski and his use of polytopes or compositions of sound and light. Also Morton Subotnick's desire to evoke musical images of the electricity fizzing and zapping in the connections between nuerons in the brain. At it's core electronic music deals with sound in terms of shape, structure, density and colour and whilst these are in all forms of music I think in electronic music much of the structural baggage of traditional forms has been striped away in order to express these sensual connections more vividly.

Lets look at one last clip of synesthesia in action. This one is from Streeta it's called Dissociative Fugue and was sent my way thanks to matrixsynth. This one is a little more complex than the last and shows the fluidity of the colours and shapes as the music changes. You can see that Streeta's basic visual patterning is based on crosshatching, the melody is a wiggly line and different instruments have different colours. "This was an attempt to visualize some of the abstract noise that goes on inside my head when listening to music." - Stretta



Well that's it. My longest most coherent post ever :) If you got to the bottom I hope you enjoyed it. I haven't really proven anything and like I said earlier the link to electronic music is tenuous but maybe you have something to think about just before you go to sleep and those visual patterns start floating around in your mind.

If you want more information definitely check out Richard E. Cytowic's roughly 30 minute talk on youtube. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

Also look at a more in-depth review of synesthesia in music from the very beginnings of western music at Therminvox.