The Life of a Crayon (2008)

I wrote this solo piano piece just after my research on Synaesthesia.  It was originally titled Colors, Yellow/Gold, Red/Blue, Green, while the title The Life of a Crayon, has a melancholy suffering artist twist that seemed ironic and metaphorical at the time, but I still like the simplicity of the title Colors.  I had all of the ideas in the paper I posted previous to this link floating around in my head when I wrote this piece, but the only technique I used to really draw in Synaesthesia into the piece was to think really hard about each color while I wrote the three movements.  Sounds stupid, I know, but it is also somehow occult and metaphysical in a way that can't really be explained or analyzed (well actually it can, just read my paper posted below!) Otherwise I composed using cell based linear motives, contrasted against dense chords, similar to jazz chords with harmonic extensions.  This is the only piece I've ever written by hand.  And there are no beats, and the bar lines only designate phrasing to the perfomer.  I'll see if I can scan a page in the near future. —D.W.

Research Paper on Synaesthesia

I wrote this research paper in 2008, and while hopefully being a decent paper, I think it contains some really interesting ideas, and possibly some new experiments that could be thought through or maybe even tried out. —D.W.




The Color of Sound

How Synaesthetics Could Change Your Perception of the Audio World Around You

Olivier Messiaen was known for his cross perception of color and sound known as synaesthesia.  Synaesthesia is caused when the stimulation of one sense, in this case hearing, causes a reaction in another sensory area, in this case vision.  So to put it plainly, when Messiaen heard chords, and scales, he perceived them as colors as well as sounds.    This trait was so acute in Messiaen that he was able to describe the series of notes in one of his modes (pitch material set in scalular order) like this, “gold and silver spirals against a background of brown and ruby-red vertical stripes.  Gold green and prairie-green foliage, with specks of blue, silver, and posable” (Glasow, Thomas, trans., Olivier Messiaen, Music and Color; Conversations with Claude Samuel, Portland, Oregon, Amadeus Press, 1986).

The Technique of My Musical Language, Olivier Messiaen

            Somehow Messiaen’s perceptual senses were cross-connected in a way that the average person’s are not. 

            The early 18th century reveals our earliest documentation of color-sound sense blending by Sir Isaac Newton, who speculated that there were seven distinct colors that corresponded to the seven notes of the diatonic scale.  He believed that the diatonic scale was related proportionately to the prismatic color spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and violet.  Newton conducted extensive experiments which are documented in both his treatise’s Musick, and Opticks.  However, the results of his research on this subject proved inconclusive.  And since then, synaesthesia has dropped into obscurity except by a handful of professionals who happened upon the subject through some other aspect of their careers. 

            Occasionally synaesthetes (people with synaesthesia) have risen to the attention of the popular media, such as Messiaen, from France, and Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, two famous composers from what is known as Russia’s Mighty Handful.  All three of these composers integrated color perception into their compositions, and as composers may be some of the only examples of people who conditioned their synaethesia beyond what was just initially innate to their senses. 

            Composers control the sound that affects the colors that they perceive.  Therefore looking at synaesthesia objectively through the experiences of synaesthetic composers can reveal personal opinions on the nature of how and why it occurs.  Each of these important twentieth century composers differed on the nature of this condition.  Messiaen claimed that his relationship of color and sound was conditioned by his inner vision. Where as Scriabin on the other hand believed that his relationship of color and sound was universal for all people and the colors that he perceived were the true colors that were associated to those sounds by Nature (Galeyev, B.M., I.L. Vanechkina, “Was Scriabin a Synaesthete?” Historical Perspective [October 1999]).  Another opinion that can be deduced is that synaesthesia is something innate to certain people from birth, but the colors perceived are unique to each individual. 

            Evidence in the scientific community, points us towards associative synaesthesia as being the actual way that synaesthesia works in people’s minds.  Associative synaesthesia is the process of connecting a color to a sound within ones mind.  Therefore when a person hears the C scale for example, it also triggers a photism (a visual experience of a specific color) without there being anything red physically present.  This is nothing new if you consider the fact that the written language is an associative mechanism.  When you read the word saxophone, it conjures up the image of a saxophone.  Synaesthesia could even be seen as a simple version of the complex system of association that we use to communicate with each other. 

            However, the possibility that there is a physical relationship between light and sound is almost certain.  Scriabin champions the concept of Universal Synaesthesia, that there are natural color sound relationships that true synaesthetes perceive.  Due to his strong interest in Theosophy, he distinguished what he considered to be spiritual tonalities from earthly material ones, for example he considered F# major to be spiritual or heavenly, and C and F major to be earthly and material.  Although there are documents of multiple versions of his color wheel, Scriabin rejected the idea that other people did not share these color-tonal associations.  To prove his theory, Scriabin built up a system of color-tonal analogies, and applied them to the Circle of 5ths in a color wheel arrangement. (Galeyev, B.M., I.L. Vanechkina, “Was Scriabin a Synesthete?” Historical Perspective [October 1999]).

               Scriabin only had three distinctly clear visualizations between color and sound, F (deep red), C (red, intense), and F# (bright blue or violet), the rest were deduced using partial theosophy, and the basic primary and secondary colors.  Because Scriabin used basic colors we can actually try to connect his concept with the visual color spectrum.
(Color Wheel Interpretation by Dave Waugh)
And this is exactly what Sir Isaac Newton was trying to do in his treatise, Of Musick.  

            While searching for some sort of a connection between the light and sound, Newton devised an experiment, where he divided light by a prism onto a wall.  He then had an unbiased friend determine the division of seven colors; purple, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.  This         
process was repeated several times and then the average was taken for each color division to create more accuracy, being that the human eye is somewhat fallible when it comes to microscopic light divisions.  At this point the distance ratio was determined by Newton, which he then compared to the distance ratio of the Dorian Diatonic Scale.  

             However, while Newton's primary assumption is that color, like sound, would have an octave (2:1) ratio, whereas, in terms of wave theory (explain wave theory here), color spans roughly the ratio's of a major sixth (about 700:400, corresponding to the modern conventions for violet at 400 nanometers, and red at 700).  The other problematic aspect of this experiment was the concept of the difference between colors, where they are perceived by the human eye to change, but in physics it is merely a frequency of light ray.  So you can't reliably divide up the color spectrum without considering perception of color by human senses and the human mind, for example, it do we all perceive the same blue, and do colors change at the same places in the visual spectrum for all of us.

            Another more accurate experiment might be to apply music ratios for a diatonic scale to light waves between 400nm and 700nm, and see at what frequencies you end up with.  The most problematic aspect of Newton’s experiment is that he was trying to prove a preconceived conclusion, with disregard to the natural truths he could have discovered with more open minded experimentation.  Whereas color and sound may actually line up proportionally, for an octave or so, but it appears that they operate within different natural structures.  And while some sort of physical connection between light and sound may occur in the universe at large, one of the most important aspects of synaesthesia is that of perception, because without human perception, there is no difference between frequencies of color, other than the difference in frequencies. 

            Some of the first psychological documentation of synaesthesia was done by Sabaneyev, psychologist to Scriabin.  He first declared this phenomenon of color hearing as strange, rare, interesting, and "appropriate to musicians with a sensitive imagination and a good ear".  Interestingly enough is, next to Scriabin's tonal color list he documents a tonal list of Rimsky-Korsakov,

(these are color wheels that I painted
based off the color descriptions below)

 Scriabin                                                

C: red (intense)                                    

G: orange                                              

D: yellow                                                

A: green                                                

E: sky Blue                                                 

(moonshine or frost)

B: blue (or pearly blue)                        

F sharp: bright blue or violet                        

D flat: violet or purple                                    

A flat: violet or lilac                                    

E flat: flesh                                                 

(glint of steel)                                               

B flat: rose (or steel)                                    

F: deep red                                                

Rimsky-Korsakov

C major: white
G major: brownish-gold, light
D major: daylight, yellowish, royal
A major: clear, pink
E major: blue, sapphire, bright
B major: gloomy, dark blue with steel shine

F sharp major: greyish-green
D flat major: darish, warm
A flat major: grayish-violet
E flat major: dark, gloomy, grey-bluish
B flat major: darkish
F major: green, clear (color of greenery)

           
           So while Scriabin's belief system drove him to find some sort of truth about synaesthesia, comparing his color wheel to that of another contemporary synaesthete immediately challenges his concept of universal synaesthesia.  

             In the book Olivier Messiaen Music and Color, Conversations with Claude Samuel, Messiaen was extremely detailed in his accounts of his synaesthetic vision.  Messiaen held quite detailed visualizations for each of his modes, describing the First Transposition of Mode 2 as "Blue-violet rocks speckled with little gray cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, mauve, black and white.  Blue-violet is dominant."  He also goes on do say that these colors repeat themselves at the octave, however, the hue is whiter (or lighter) when going up, and blacker (or Darker) when going down.  However, without Messiaen's admission that these are mental constructs of his inner vision, we would have no way of testing him for synaesthesia in any scientific manner, all we have to go off are his writings and interviews, and possibly some personal accounts.  But no official scientific testing on Messiaen for color sound hearing was ever done.  Because of this, the colors associated with mode two, could be speckled blue-violet rocks one day, and than, gold and silver spirals against a background of brown and ruby-red vertical stripes, the next, and we don't know weather these images were automatic or contemplative.  However, at the end of the interview on color and sound Claude Samuel states "Your descriptions are of an amazing precision, as though your observations of color were less subjective than scientific" to which Messiaen replied "I limit myself to saying what I feel".  However, saying what one feels is by no means saying if what you see is willfully generated, or reflexively automated.   

             In recent neurological research, doctoral candidates Mike J. Dixon, Daniel Smilek, Cera Cudahy, and Philip M. Merikle, conducted an experiment to determine if synaesthesia occurs naturally in some people, as if it were innate since birth, or if it is based on associative experience.  This experiment was completed July of 2000, and is summarized in an article of Nature magazine Titled Five plus Two Equals yellow.  This experiment was devised to test a synaesthete with digit color association for consistency and speed recognition.  Being as there is no way currently to see what someone else's imagination is seeing, or even to see what their eyes are seeing, scientists must rely on reaction and response to stimuli.   In this case the stimuli is a black digit, as in the number one on an index card, and the reaction is called a Photism - a visual experience of a specific color.  This experiment was conducted under the hypothesis, "that synaesthetic experiences differ from imagery in their consistency, automaticity and reliance on external stimuli to induce them".  However, what they discovered was that not only were the reactions of one of their test subjects consistent and automatic, "but we find that an externally presented inducing stimulus is not necessary to trigger a photism and that simply activating the concept of a digit is sufficient".  In laymen’s terms this means that the cause of synaesthesia does not have to do with a persons sensory equipment, that it occurs because of connections within the mind. 

            During an NPR radio broadcast of the concept and results of this experiment Ph.D. candidate Daniel Smilek revealed some scientific speculations on the origins of synaesthesia.  That all babies and young toddlers experience sense blending on many levels, and we grow older our sensory faculties develop and allow us unique input through each type.  Eventually our eyes perceive light, our ears sound and so forth. 

            But throughout this speculative and conclusive data, we get back to the fact that synaesthesia has a lot less to do with our sensory inputs, i.e. our eyes and ears, and has a lot more to do with our minds.  So once the sensory data is gathered, it goes to an unusual place in our brain, take for example the data gathered in the previous experiment where the mere idea of a digit was enough to induce a photism, therefore eliminating sensory input as a factor for this reaction.

            An experiment that I have devised may bring us closer to physical understanding of synaesthesia.  The experiment would be, to but someone in an MRI, and then show them different index cards with colors on them.  Each time, the subject sees a color, than a brain imaging photo should be taken.  Then while the subject is still in the MRI, a series of different musical scales will be played, each time a scale is played, than a brain imaging photo should be taken.  Finally the results of the color photos should be compared with the musical photos to cross reference for similarity.  If the person is a synaesthete, than there will probably be similar brain stimulation from the color photos and the sound photos. 

            However, all of this information leaves a wide margin for this phenomenon to be based on association.  Messiaen felt that he could develop this experience.  This evidence leads me to believe that synaesthesia is something halfway in and halfway out of the mind.  That while imagination can seemingly enhance this experience for people, there is a something about it that is outside of their mental control. 

            In the context of association, it is easy for us to realize that it is very common for people to associate two ideas together in their minds.  Take for example memory games that employ simple imagery to recall vocabulary words.  We associate things together all the time.  To take it one step further, we can reference Pavlov's law, and not only is there association going on, but a reaction to that association, where a bell rings, and a dog drools, without there even being any food present.  In the case of synaesthesia, we could eventually play a chord, and then see a color, without consciously remembering what color we decided to associate with that chord.   To go further just as we have all somehow collectively agreed upon names for specific colors that everyone uses as 'universal', orange, red, etc. we could collectively decide on musical sounds that represent those colors as well.   From looking at this research it seems like anyone can be a synaesthete, if they put their mind to it.

Bibliography

Dingle, Christopher, The Life of Messiaen. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Sacks, Oliver, Musicophilia. Toronto, Canada, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 2007.

Glasow, Thomas, trans., Olivier Messiaen, Music and Color; Conversations with Caude Samuel, Portland, Oregon, Amadeus Press, 1986.

Dixon, Mike J., Daniel Smilek, Cera Cudahy, Philip M. Merikle, "Five plus two equals yellow: Mental Arithmetic in People With Synaesthesia is not Coloured by Visual Experience," Nature 406 [July 27 2000]: 365.

Pesic, Peter, "Isaac Newton and the mystery of the major sixth: a transcription of his manuscript 'Of Musick' with commentary," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Vol 34, NO.4, [2006] Santa Fe, NM

Galeyev, B.M., I.L. Vanechkina, “Was Scriabin a Synesthete?” Historical Perspective [October 1999]