Hearing in colors? Food for thought, brought about by musings on Scriabin, Messaien, and searching for answers: "Olivier Messaien, a composer, describes himself as having color- sound synaesthesia. He talks about experiencing the "gentle cascade of blue-orange chords" while listening to Quator pour la fin du temps . He later talked of seeing "colours which move with the music" and sensing these colors "in an extremely vivid manner." "Aleksandr Scriabin (1872-1915), a Russian composer, worked to incorporate his own synaesthesia into his concerts. In 1911 he wrote a symphony entitled Prometheus, the Poem of Fire . This symphony was to incorporate the usual orchestra, piano, organ, and choir. However, this score also included orchestrations for a "clavier a lumieres", or color organ, which would play colored light during the symphony. The light would be in the shape of clouds, beams, and other shapes which would "flood" the concert hall. The climax would include a white light so strong as to be "painful to the eyes." The first performance of Prometheus took place on March 29, 1915, in Carnegie Hall. "Colored Hearing Theories "For colored hearing synaesthesia in particular, three psychological theories have been put forward. The doctrine of the unity of the senses or linkage theory, proposes that the perpetuation of a primitive perceptual experience in the limbic system is the root cause of color synaesthesia. As this system evolved, the perception was differentiated into two separate senses, hearing and vision. A similar theory, the crosstalk theory, holds that auditory and visual information pathways may cross in synaesthetes. These cross-modal neural connections may be numerically greater than usual or simply used in different ways. Some believe higher cognitive/cortical level processing (the limbic system is thought to be lower level) to be involved. According to this view, colored hearing synaesthesia is the result of a chain of mental associations, some of the intermediate links having dropped out of awareness. For instance, a person may see red every time they hear a trumpet because of the red uniforms of a brass band. "Feedback connections aid us in imagery, memory, sensory attention and other cognitive functions, but could they also result in synaesthesia? Auditory and visual information must meet somewhere in the brain or we could not process them in conjunction as they occur. These systems may contain feedback pathways normally but, in synaesthetes, they may be altered to include information from the other senses! "As you can see, synaesthesia is an extremely complex phenomenon. As methods for exploring the way the brain works improve, the mechanisms of synaesthesia may be revealed." Source: http://www.macalstr.edu/~psych/whathap/UBNRP/synesthesia/SYNBRA~1.HTM Gina ----- Original Message ----- From: <ANRPiano@AOL.COM> To: <pianotech@ptg.org> Sent: Thursday, December 16, 1999 1:05 AM Subject: Re: Perfect Pitch...Matthew > In a message dated 12/15/99 9:46:10 AM Central Standard Time, A440A@AOL.COM > writes: > > << Greetings, > I hear this statement a lot. Invariably from "perfect pitch" people > that > have never sat down at an equally tuned piano that is exactly1/2 step flat. > However, I have had fresh stringing jobs in the shop that I chipped and > pitched 1/2 step flat, and invite those that ascribe colors to ET to come > and > listen. It never fails that as I play in the key of C, they hear the > "color" > of B. When I get into G, they always tell me that they recognize the colors > in the key of F# when they hear it!! > If there are different "colors" ascribed to keys in ET, it is a pitch > dependant, learned response. It is not due to the tempering. > Regards, > Ed Foote > > >> > Ed, > I think for the most part you are right. It is difficult to say why I have a > different sense of color for different keys in ET. I may be reacting to > tember as much as pitch. It could be emotional memory. I may be remembering > emotions I felt from different pieces in the same key. (If you look at the > totality of music written, esp. before the 20th cent. composers seemed to > associate certain emotional states with certain keys.) > > Human memory is so complex it is difficult to always know how much our past > experience is impacting our current experience. With that said I will grant > your point and have to try that experiment out on myself soon. > > Andrew Remillard >
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