Perfect Pitch...Matthew

[ginacarter]

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
>