[jon_010101]

So, for those not familiar with the concept of synaesthesia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

The vocabulary used in describing "sound" (and to a great extent, music) is shared with that used to describe other sensual experiences.  For example, we use words like "bright", "dark", "glassy", "colored", "dry", "warm", "cold", "round", "textured".  We discuss the concept of "imaging".  Tube amps which are overly colored may suggest the experience of "rose-colored glasses".  Bad solid state amps may be described as sounding "gray".  Good amps may be "transparent".  Single ended triodes are described as sounding "vivid and colorful".  These terms are also used throughout the recording, production process.

The question then arises: is synaesthetic perception an innate human function -- an in-built method of interpretation -- or is it a learned technique for describing perceptions?  Some recent studies suggest it may be innate, although only a fraction of the population may perceive it consciously http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-06/rd/synesthesia-appears-ubiquitous/

So, do you experience synaesthetic visual perception of music/sound?  Have you always?  Do your perceptions agree with others?  Do you have visual memories of auditory experiences?  Could you draw a picture of a musical performance/playback?

Of course, there is no accounting for taste -- some people actually like the sound of a "gray/glassy" solid state amp, or a "colored" SET amp  .  But, do we, to some extent, perceive such "colorations" in a similar way?  Would we all agree that amps with audible odd-order distortion sound gray while amps with even order distortion sound colorful?  Do we all perceive these colors, or simply adopt the vocabulary?

Discuss at will!  I'll hide for a bit to see if this thread takes off or dies  

[Duke]

One of my sons has music-color synesthesia.  He's in his late teens and just discovered that his experience of seeing colors when he hears a song is not normal.  He had assumed that everybody experienced the same thing until he recently saw a documentary on television about synesthesia. 

Duke

[shep]

This definitely turns me on more than reading about people's DACs!
I was fed a pure, unadulterated formula of TAS from it's (and my) beginning so I always assumed this is how the world "viewed" their sound (read audio) experience. It made perfect sense and still does and I wouldn't know how to describe my experience otherwise. Definitely a learned rather than innate
perception though. I stopped listening to hi-fi for a few years and when I started again I had to re-acquire or re-new my aural vocabulary. It had gotten monotonous, undefined, in the interval. On the otherhand, I don't hear the world outside these four walls thru the same filter so I guess that means this way of description is and not natural to me but acquired.

[ZLS]

Has a study ever been done to determine if all the people who experience this phenomena see the same colors in response to certain music tones? 
    Is it based simply on the frequency of hertz or do overtones need to be involved?

[gooberdude]

This is very interesting.   I doubt i have the condition, but often when i'm tweaking or changing things I settle on the set-up that seems to bring the most colorful audio presentation.  its easy for me to discern a gray sound versus a colorful or vibrant one.  kinda cool when i can A-B the tweaks and go from grey to a rainbow of colors instantly.

[PaulHilgeman]

Interesting stuff.  I have always thought that some of it was intrinsic to humans in general, and then refined by listening, describing and hearing others' thoughts.

The most telling case of this is with wives etc, at a wedding the other day my wife called the music reproduction system 'edgy' and 'sizzly' and that the bass was 'slow to start and long to stop'.  Pretty much how I would describe a system with too much distortion in the mid and low treble regions, and a ported box tuned with a peak at 50Hz or so.  She doesn't care about how it is reproduced just that it sounds pretty good, we rarely talk about audio and she has rarely described what she has heard to me, but her descriptions made perfect sense, and all I had to say was 'exactly'.

More subtle differences may be harder for an untrained listener to describe, but nonetheless, I think the core ability to do this is there for everyone.

Paul Hilgeman

[chadh]

I'm not sure that I understand what this "condition" really is.  Or perhaps I simply don't understand why it is identified as a condition at all.

Let's say a piece of music is played to me.  How do we "expect" my brain to react?  Certainly we expect it to do all sorts of mundane analysis, asking questions like "have I heard this music before?", "what are the lyrics for the refrain?", "doesn't this sound like a cross between Bach and Mozart - sort of like a Mach composition?" etc.  And we expect there to be some sort of emotional response: "Listening to The Cure makes me depressed", "Listening to Kylie Minogue makes we want to destroy something," "listening to James Brown makes me feel good" etc.

But is this the extent of "normal" responses to music?  Doesn't music usually evoke some other reactions?  Doesn't it conjure images and memories at times?  Doesn't it make us think about things?  Doesn't it make us imagine things, explore ideas, clarify deep questions?  If every time i listen to Miles playing Flemenco Sketches I involuntarily think of changing seasons, am I doing something out of the ordinary?  Or am I just letting my mind wander the way a mind tends to wander when stimulated?  If every time I hear the band Chicago  on the radio I feel like I'm 13 years old and leafing through a soft core porn magazine, is my mind doing something worthy of note, or is it just doing what minds tend to do?  If I listen to Jimi Hendrix and "see" splashes of color pulsing in my mind, as though the music were expressing those colors explicitly, am I doing anything fundamentally different?  Sure, this whole "color" thing is more abstract than some other reactions - but we don't usually think that Jackson Pollock and Michelangelo were engaged in fundamentally different activities simply because one expressed himself with realistic images while the other used abstract ones.

So is this synaesthesia worthy of note because of the abstract nature of the response generated?  I doubt it.  Or is there something about the synesthetic response that makes it significantly different from some other product of a healthy imagination?

Of course, I have absolutely no expertise in psychology or neurology or anything like that, so my views are probably of little relevance to anybody.  But for what it's worth, I tend to think that the human brain is inherently creative.  Some people naturally create colorful images in their brains when they hear music, some create personalities for numbers and letters, some imagine numbers forming intricate patterns: these all seem very natural to me, even though these are not experiences that I usually have.  The novelty isn't a surprise.  I expect that the particular reactions that my brain has to music are probably novel to most other people as well.  I would actually find it much more amazing to discover that some people simply don't have any comparable reaction when they hear music.  I would wonder what had happened for such a  person to suppress the inherent creativity of her mind.

As for all the visual or tactile adjectives that people use to describe sound:  I suspect these have little or nothing to do with synaesthesia.  When somebody presents us with a test question like: "Hat is to head just as _______ is to hand,"  most of us are going to guess that the blank is appropriately filled with "glove".  This is not because we "feel" glove is the right answer, or because something deep inside our souls conjures the image of a glove when somebody says "hand", but because we infer the nature of the relationship from the statement linking hat and head.   Similarly, we infer what is meant when someone pairs the words "bright" and "sound" by considering the relationship between word "bright" and the word "color".  Our brains are able to distill the essence of "brightness" in such a way that it can be applied to sound.  Amazingly, our brains seem to do this very consistently, so that almost everybody is going to come to the conclusion that a ride cymbal sounds "bright". Importantly,  this conclusion is reached without relying on anybody actually seeing any bright color her mind's eye when hearing a ride cymbal played.

Chad