Can we really hear music in colour?

By Tom Service

It really doesn’t make much sense, when you think about it. Why is so much of the way that we talk about music, about sound, so saturated with colour – or at least, so full of references to what it looks like?

We talk about “dark” sounds and “light” sounds – the opening of Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, down there in the double-basses and the bassoons, is just about as dark as it gets, surely; if you want brightness, think of the opening chord of the Star Wars theme tune: bold, brilliant, brassy, and blazingly bright. Maybe even gold, if you wanted me to tell you what colour I thought it was! But hold on a minute: these sounds don’t have any actual colouristic properties at all. They’re frequencies of sound waves, for goodness’s sake, not some kind of sonic rainbows!

The question is: why does it not seem nonsensical to talk about sounds in this way? Because literally speaking, there is, surely, no relation between the realm of colour – appreciated through our eyes – and the sounds we hear and experience through our ears.

Are you a musical synaesthete?

And yet: for more composers, songwriters, and listeners than you might imagine, sounds really do have colours, whether we’re talking about the orchestration or arrangement of a track, a particular combination of notes, the texture of a vocalist’s performance, or a particular rhythmic pattern. It’s what’s called synaesthesia: the activation of one sensory realm by another. If you’re a musical synaesthete, then you’ll see colours when you hear music, and wonder why everyone else doesn’t. (Synaesthesia works across all the other senses as well: for some, individual letters and words have colours, and it can work in reverse too, so that colours become sounds.) That’s the experience of musicians from the French composer Olivier Messiaen to Lady Gaga, from the Russian mystic sensualist Alexander Scriabin to Pharrell Williams.

Messiaen is the most famous example of a synaesthetic composer in the 20th Century. He composed his works as soundtracks of colour, so that his pieces – when he heard them – would be instantly conjured as swirls of purple, bursts of red, shards and shapes of yellow, blue, and green. And that might just be a few seconds of a piece like his Three Little Liturgies.

But, the problem with synaesthesia is that it’s so individual. Everyone from the medieval visionary Hildegard of Bingen to Duke Ellington – another pair of compositional synaesthetes – has their own, completely personal colour-sound lexicon, which means that communicating what is an essential part of their musical experience to anyone else is basically impossible. We can imagine what Messiaen saw only if we’re told about it, and even then, our experience won’t really be the same as his own colouristic inspiration. At least Alexander Scriabin tried to get round the problem by writing a part for a so-called Light Organ, which would project a kaleidoscope of colours in precise synchronisation with his apocalyptically powerful orchestral works.

Scriabin’s dream was never realised in the early years of the 20th Century. But in a sense, his dream comes true every night that an aging popular beat combo plays a sell-out stadium: the son et lumière of any stadium show is a conjuring of the same overwhelming combination of sound and visuals that Scriabin dreamed of – even if it’s more about promoting the merch for our silver-haired rockers than it is bringing about the end of the world, as Scriabin wanted to do!

Newton’s Treatise of Opticks

And it’s not just musicians who have tried to pin down this troublingly imprecise yet apparently all-pervasive link between hearing and colour. Isaac Newton’s “Treatise of Opticks” in the 17th Century was also a theory of musicks! Newton assigned each of the seven colours of the rainbow to one of the seven notes of the major scale: imagine the white notes of the piano, but translate each pitch – C, D, E, and all the rest – to indigo, orange, and red, and the other colours that white light is made from.

Newton’s “optickal” theories are still remembered as important science, but his linking of the visual realm with musical tones is all but forgotten. That’s for a good reason: this time, Newton was profoundly wrong. There is, in fact, no meaningful, scientific connection between the way that light works in the electromagnetic spectrum and the frequencies of sound waves. It’s a fiction: something we have to imagine, not a fact of physical life.

And yet, Newton was also profoundly… right! He intuited what we all feel, which is that it feels completely natural to think about and talk about and imagine music in terms of colours, of a spectrum of darkness and lightness.

Where one sense starts and another one ends

As Jamie Ward, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, tells us on The Listening Service, there is, in fact, a good reason for this phenomenon. It’s because in the earliest stages of our development as infants, our brains don’t make the same distinctions between where one sense starts and another one ends as we do when we grow up. We’re all synaesthetes, in other words – at least at the start of our lives – since sound and colour are perceived as the same phenomenon. Yet this vestigial power of association continues for all of us, in different ways. Some of us will be synaesthetes, wedded to particular colours triggered by precise musical stimuli; for the rest of us, it works as a looser, but just as kaleidoscopic, range of responses.

Right. I’m off to hear some green music – literally, Michael Torke’s Green. Or maybe to surf the musical rainbow that is Arthur Bliss’s Colour Symphony.

It’s all about sound and vision, as David Bowie said. Wearing a particularly loud tie… Can objects be noisy? Oh blimey. Here we go again… You see? We’re really all synaesthesing, all the time!

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