Musical Colors

[chopiabin]

I don't know if this is common or not, but when I listen to music, I almost always conjure colors in my mind. These colors are distictive to the piece, and are very specific. Does anyone else do this? Is it synaesthesia? For example:

Scriabin's 5th sonata: mostly chartreuse with some gold, red, and a little black.

Chopin's Revolutionary: pale slatish blue with some black.

Chopin's 4th nocturne: Lots of red in different shades.

Scriabin's eighth sonata: purple, royal blue, lavender etc.

[bernhard]

Yes.

It is not that uncommon. (But I don't experience it).

Have you ever heard of Amy Beach? (There goes an underrated underplayed composer!)

She was an American composer (1867 - 1944) who was also a child prodigy. All her life she could "see" sounds as colours. When she was around 3 years old, she started telling her mother of her musical preferences by referring to the pieces as "the blue music", or "the pink" music.

Eventually they found out that each note had a specific colour:

Blue - Ab
Green - A
Pink - Eb
Violet - Db
White - C
Red - G
Yelllow - E
Black - F# minor or G# minor.

This stayed fixed for all her life. It was one of the reasons - she explained later - why she could do complex harmonizations at four - she basically saw the coulours she wanted and went after them.

[chopiabin]

That's really cool. I knew about people who saw each note as a color, but mine seems to be much more piece-dependent. Thanks for your response!

[bernhard]

Here is some more stuff about Synesthaesia:

Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov freely associated with colours when they composed. To Rimsky C major was  white and A major was rosy. To Scriabin C major was red and A major was green. One would imagine that it was all personal. But there was a surprising amount of agreement between them: Both associated E major with blue (R: sapphire blue - S: blue-white). Ab major was purple (R: grayish violet - S: purple violet) D major was yellow.

Writers were also into it: Nabokov, Faulkner, Virginia Woolfm Huysmans, Joyce, Dylan Thomas. Baudelaire actually wrote a poem on sense correspondences.

And the Symbolist movement in art was really about synesthesia.

And of course, a bit of mescalin and LSD can really help - just read Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

And come to think of it, this is really what Disney's fantasia is all about: calssical musica and colour

Apparently synesthesia is hereditary.

[chopiabin]

Rimbaud also had it. Now that I think about it, I do sort of associate colors with some of the notes, but not all.

C -definitely a yellow
D - maybe orange, not quite sure
E - definitely a green, maybe forest or something with a little grey in it
F - some sort of brown
G - not really sure
A - reddish I think
B - definitely a shade of blue

[bernhard]

Do you/can you use it for things like memorisation and improvisation. I guess it would give you a definite edge.

[chopiabin]

I think of the pieces I play in defintie shapes and colors, but I have never really thought about using it like that. I should probably try it.

[bitus]

I think in warm or cold and i guess i could associate it with colors... c, e, g, b, f# are cold... the rest warm. This is also the way i distinguish notes if i hear them played, and i guess this is what i would call perfect pitch in my case.
Anybody thinking the same?
The Bitus

[comme_le_vent]

i dunno bout u, but whenever i hear maksim - i see red!