Musicophilia

by Oliver Sacks

  For many years, the only patient I knew to be a synesthete was a painter who suddenly became totally colorblind following a head injury.3 He lost not only the ability to perceive or even imagine color, but also the automatic seeing of color with music which he had had all his life. Though this was, in a sense, the least of his losses, it was nevertheless a significant one, for music had always been “enriched,” as he put it, by the colors that accompanied it.

  This persuaded me that synesthesia was a physiological phenomenon, dependent on the integrity of certain areas of the cortex and the connections between them— in his case, between specific areas in the visual cortex needed to construct the perception or imagery of color. The destruction of these areas in this man had left him unable to experience any color, including “colored” music.

  Of all the different forms of synesthesia, musical synesthesia— especially color effects experienced while listening to or thinking of music— is one of the most common, and perhaps the most dramatic. We do not know if it is more common in musicians or musical people, but musicians are, of course, more likely to be aware of it, and many of the people who have recently described their musical synesthesias to me have been musicians.

  * * *

  THE EMINENT contemporary composer Michael Torke has been deeply influenced by experiences with colored music. Torke showed striking musical gifts at an early age, and when he was five he was given a piano, and a piano teacher. “I was already a composer at five,” he says— his teacher would divide pieces into sections, and Michael would rearrange the sections in different orders as he played.

  One day he remarked to his teacher, “I love that blue piece.”

  His teacher was not sure she had heard correctly: “Blue?”

  “Yes,” said Michael, “the piece in D major…D major is blue.”

  “Not for me,” the teacher replied. She was puzzled, and Michael, too, for he assumed that everyone saw colors associated with musical keys. When he began to realize that not everyone shared this synesthesia, he had difficulty imagining what that would be like. He thought it would amount to “a sort of blindness.”

  Michael has had this kind of key synesthesia— seeing fixed colors associated with the playing of music, scales, arpeggios, anything with a key signature— as far back as he can remember. He has always had absolute pitch, too, as far as he knows. This in itself makes musical keys absolutely distinctive for him: G-sharp minor, for example, has a different “flavor” from G minor, he says, in the same way that major and minor keys have different qualities for the rest of us. Indeed, he says, he cannot imagine having key synesthesia without having absolute pitch. Each key, each mode, for him, looks as distinctive (and as “characteristic”) as it sounds.

  The colors have been constant and fixed since his earliest years, and they appear spontaneously. No effort of will or imagination can change them. They seem completely natural to him, and preordained. The colors are highly specific. G minor, for example, is not just “yellow,” but “ochre” or “gamboge.” D minor is “like flint, graphite” F minor is “earthy, ashy.” He struggles to find the right word, as he would struggle to find the right paint or crayon.

  The colors of major and minor keys are always related (for instance, G minor is a subdued yellow ochre, G major bright yellow), but otherwise he is hard put to find any system or rule by which the colors of particular keys might be predicted. At one time, he wondered whether the colors had been suggested by actual associations when he was very young— a toy piano, perhaps, with each key a different color— but he has no clear memories of any such thing. He feels, in any case, that there are far too many color associations (fourteen for the major and minor keys, another half dozen for the modes, as a start) to make such an explanation likely. Moreover, some keys seem to have strange hues which he can hardly describe, and which he has almost never seen in the world about him.4

  When I asked Michael in what sense he “saw” his colors, he spoke of their luminosity. The colors had a sort of transparent, luminous brilliance, he said, “like a screen” before him, but they in no way occluded or altered his normal vision. What would happen, I asked, if he saw a D-major “blue” while looking at a yellow wall— would he see green? No, he replied; his synesthetic colors were wholly inward and never confused with external colors. Yet subjectively, they were very intense and “real.”

  The colors he sees with musical keys have been absolutely fixed and consistent for forty years or more, and he wonders whether they were present at birth, or determined when he was a newborn. Others have tested the accuracy and consistency of his color-key associations over time, and they have not changed.

  He sees no colors associated with isolated notes or different pitches. Nor will he see color if, say, a fifth is played— for a fifth, as such, is ambiguous, not associated with a particular key. There needs to be a major or minor triad or a succession of notes sufficient to indicate the basic key signature. “Everything goes back to the tonic,” he says. Context, however, is also important; thus Brahms’s Second Symphony is in D major (blue), but one movement is in G minor (ochre). This movement will still be blue if played in the context of the whole symphony, but it may be ochre if he reads, plays, or imagines it separately.

  He particularly liked Mozart and Vivaldi as a boy, above all for their use of keys, which, he says, was “pure, narrow…they used a simpler palette.” Later, in adolescence, he became enamored of Chopin, Schumann, the Romantic composers— though, with their convoluted modulations, they made special demands on his synesthesia.

  Michael does not have any color associations with musical pattern or texture, rhythm, instruments, composers, mood, or emotion— only with key. He does, however, have other sorts of nonmusical synesthesia. For him, letters, numbers, and days of the week all have their own particular colors, and a peculiar topography or landscape as well.5

  I asked Michael what role, if any, his musical synesthesia played in his creative life, whether it took his thinking and imagination in unexpected directions.6 There was an explicit connection, he answered, between color and key in the first orchestral music he wrote, a series of five pieces called Color Music in which each piece explored the musical possibilities of a single key— and thus a single color. The first of these pieces was entitled “Ecstatic Orange” the others were “Bright Blue Music,” “Green,” “Purple,” and “Ash.” But apart from these early pieces, Michael has never again made explicit use of his key synesthesia in his work— a remarkable and ever-expanding range of music which now includes operas, ballets, and symphonic pieces. He is frequently asked whether synesthesia has made much difference to his life, especially as a professional musician. He says, “For me, at least, it’s no big deal.” For him, it is normal and completely unremarkable.

  DAVID CALDWELL, another composer, also has musical synesthesia, but of a distinctly different sort. When I mentioned Michael’s equation of yellow with G major to him, he exclaimed, “That seems wrong to me!” So too was Michael’s green for E major, and indeed most of Michael’s colors (although, David said, he could see the “logic” of some of them). Every synesthete has his own color correspondences.

  Color-key association goes both ways for David; seeing a piece of transparent golden-yellow glass on my windowsill put him in mind of B-flat major. (“Something clear and golden about that key,” he said. Was it, he wondered, the color of brass? Trumpets, he said, are B-flat instruments, and a lot of brass music is written in this key.) He is not sure what determines his particular colors: Have they arisen from experience, by conventional association? Are they arbitrary? Have they any “meaning”?

  While David does not have perfect pitch, he has excellent relative pitch. He remembers accurately the pitch of many songs and many instruments, and can immediately infer from this what key any piece is played in. Each key, he says, “has its own quality”— and each key also has its own individual color.

  David feels that the color of music is central to his mu
sical sensibility and musical thought, for it is not just keys that have distinctive colors; musical themes, patterns, ideas, and moods have colors too, as do particular instruments and parts for them. Synesthetic colors accompany every stage of his musical thinking; his groping for “the underlying structure of things” is facilitated by color, and he knows he is on course, that he is achieving his goal, when the synesthetic colors seem right. Color flavors and enriches and, above all, clarifies his musical thinking. But it is difficult to pin down or systematize his correspondences. When I asked him to make a chart of his synesthetic colors, he thought for a few days and then wrote to me:

  The more I’ve tried to fill in the blanks on my chart, the more tenuous the connections have seemed. Michael’s connections are so fixed, and don’t seem to involve intellectual or emotional consideration. Mine, on the other hand, have a lot to do with how I feel about keys and how I use them in composing and playing music.

  Gian Beeli, Michaela Esslen, and Lutz Jäncke, researchers in Zurich, have described a professional musician with both music-color and music-taste synesthesia: “Whenever she hears a specific musical interval, she automatically experiences a taste on her tongue that is consistently linked to that musical interval.” In a 2005 article in Nature, they detailed her associations:

  Minor second

  Sour

  Major second

  Bitter

  Minor third

  Salty

  Major third

  Sweet

  Fourth

  (Mown grass)

  Tritone

  (Disgust)

  Fifth

  Pure water

  Minor sixth

  Cream

  Major sixth

  Low-fat cream

  Minor seventh

  Bitter

  Major seventh

  Sour

  Octave

  No taste

  Any auditory uncertainty as to what musical interval she is hearing is immediately compensated for by its “taste,” for her musical-synesthetic tastes are instantaneous, automatic, and always correct. I have also heard of violinists who make use of synesthesia to tune their instruments, and piano tuners who find it useful in their work.

  * * *

  CHRISTINE LEAHY, a writer, visual artist, and guitar player, has strong synesthesia for letters, numbers, and days of the week, as well as a strong, though less specific, color synesthesia for music. Her letter chromesthesia is especially strong, and if a word begins with a “red” letter, for example, its redness may spread to involve the whole word.7

  Christine does not have absolute pitch and cannot perceive any intrinsic difference between different keys. But the color concomitants of letters also apply to the letters of the musical scale, so that if she knows that a particular note is D, it will elicit a sensation of greenness as vivid as that of the letter D. This synesthesia applies also to the sound of the note. She described the following color sensations when tuning her guitar, bringing a string down from E (blue) to D (green): “Rich, saturated blue…blue fading out, it seems grainier…a textured and unsaturated green…a smooth, pure, rich green.”

  I asked about what happened, visually, with the semitone, the E-flat, between E and D, and she said, “Nothing; it’s a blank.” None of the sharps or flats have color concomitants for her, though she perceives them and plays them without any difficulty. When she plays a diatonic scale— the scale of C major— she sees a “rainbow” of colors in spectral order, each color “dissolving” into the next. But when she plays a chromatic scale, the colors are interrupted by a series of “blanks.” She ascribes this to the fact that when she was very young, she learned the alphabet by means of colored letter magnets on the refrigerator. These were organized in groups of seven (A to G, H to N, etc.), their colors corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow, but there was nothing, of course, corresponding to sharps or flats in these letters.8

  She regards her musical synesthesia as an enhancement or enrichment of music, even though it may have initially had a linguistic rather than a musical origin. She was aghast when I told her the story of the colorblind painter and how he had lost his musical synesthesia when he became colorblind. She would be “stricken,” she said, if she were to lose hers— it would be “like losing a sense.”

  * * *

  PATRICK EHLEN is a psychologist and songwriter who has very extensive synesthesia— not only to music but to sounds of all sorts, from musical instruments to car horns, voices, animal noises, thunder— so that the world of sound is continuously transformed into a flowing world of colors and shapes. He also has color synesthesia to letters, numbers, and days of the week. He remembers how his first-grade teacher, seeing him staring into space, asked what he was looking at. He replied that he was “counting the colors till Friday.” The whole class burst into laughter, and thereafter he kept such matters to himself.

  It was only when he was eighteen, in a chance conversation with a fellow student, that he heard the term “synesthesia”— and realized that what he had always had, and had always taken for granted, was in fact “a condition.” His curiosity aroused, he began reading about synesthesia, and thought about writing his dissertation on the subject. He feels that his synesthesia moved him to become a psychologist, though his professional work has been in other realms— speech, discourse, linguistics— and not in synesthesia.

  Some of his synesthetic correspondences are of mnemonic use to him (thus when someone said that 9/11 was a Monday, he could instantly and with assurance say that it was not, for Tuesday is yellow for him, and 9/11 is yellow too). But it is the musical synesthesia which plays a vital part in his sensibility and his creative life.

  Patrick does not experience, like Michael Torke, a fixed relation between color and key (this seems to be a relatively rare form of musical synesthesia, perhaps because it demands absolute pitch too). Synesthesia, for Patrick, is evoked by virtually every other aspect of music: its rhythm and tempo, the shapes of melodies, their modulation into different keys, the richness of harmonies, the timbre of different instruments, and, especially, the overall character and mood of what he is hearing. Listening to music for Patrick is immensely enhanced— never occluded or distracted— by the rich stream of visual sensations that accompany it.

  But it is in composing, above all, that he values his synesthesia. Patrick has songs, fragments of songs, and ideas for songs continually running through his head, and his synesthesia is crucial for their realization, an integral part of the creative process. The very concept of music, for him, is infused with the visual. Color is not “added” to music, it is integral to it. He only wishes that others could share this totality, and he tries to suggest it, he says, as fully as he can, in his own songs.

  * * *

  SUE B., another synesthete, seems to experience musical synesthesia not so much with color as with light, shape, and position. She describes her experience this way:

  I always see images when I hear music, but I do not associate specific colors with particular musical keys or musical intervals. I wish that I could say that a minor third is always a blue-green color, but I do not distinguish the intervals all that well. My musical skills are pretty modest. When I hear music, I see little circles or vertical bars of light getting brighter, whiter, or more silvery for higher pitches and turning a lovely, deep maroon for the lower pitches. A run up the scale will produce a succession of increasingly brighter spots or vertical bars moving upward, while a trill, like in a Mozart piano sonata, will produce a flicker. High distinct notes on a violin evoke sharp bright lines, while notes played with vibrato seem to shimmer. Several stringed instruments playing together evoke overlapping, parallel bars or, depending on the melody, spirals of light of different shades shimmering together. Sounds made by brass instruments produce a fan-like image. High notes are positioned slightly in front of my body, at head level, and toward the right, while bass notes are located deep in the center of my abdomen. A chord will envelop m
e.

  THE HISTORY OF scientific interest in synesthesia has gone through many vicissitudes. In the early nineteenth century, when Keats and Shelley and other poets used extravagant intersensory images and metaphors, it seemed that synesthesia was no more than a poetic or imaginative conceit. Then came a series of careful psychological studies in the 1860s and 1870s, culminating in Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development in 1883. These served to legitimate the phenomenon and were soon followed by the introduction of the word “synesthesia.” Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with Rimbaud and the Symbolist poets, the notion of synesthesia again seemed a poetic conceit, and it ceased to be regarded as a subject for scientific investigation.9 This changed yet again in the last third of the twentieth century, as John Harrison details in his excellent book Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing. In the 1980s, Richard Cytowic made the first neurophysiological studies of synesthetic subjects— studies that, for all their technical limitations, seemed to show a genuine activation of different sensory areas in the brain (e.g., auditory and visual) coincident with synesthetic experiences. In 1989, he published a pioneering text, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, and this was followed by a popular exploration of the subject in 1993, The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Current techniques of functional brain imaging now give unequivocal evidence for the simultaneous activation or coactivation of two or more sensory areas of the cerebral cortex in synesthetes, just as Cytowic’s work had predicted.