CHAT: TAN CHAT: synaesthesia (was OT CHAT: Asperger's syndrome)

At 22:56 23.6.2000 -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
>Jonathan Chang wrote:
>>    I have really strange one: synaethesia... I sometimes see certain
>>"sounds" as neon-like colours (like after-images) in the fringes -
>periphery
>>- of my field of vision.
>>    The musical terms _sound-colour_ and _timbral colouration_  have real
>>deeper meanings to me.
>>     Prob'ly this why I am so much into sounds & music.>
>
>An amazing gift.  Are you familiar with Scriabin?  I wonder if you would see
the same colors he did......

According to literature there seems to be a general scheme:

[i] yellow  [y] green                   [u] blue

    [e] orange  [%] brown [@] grey  [o] purple

                        [a] red

Note how the vowel triangle and color triangle are isometric!

It works for me, tho it is not as strong as with Jonathan.  To me it is
more a matter of abstract association.  Apparently Otto Jespersen was
synaesthetic, and associated a whole range of sensory data, e.g. the smell
of fried meat, the sound [%] and the color brown all belonged together for
him!  He also said that this faculty obviously could be trained: he had met
a blind person who shared the meat-[%] association, and they started
discussing the subject.  It ended up with Jespersen telling the blind man
about his color-vowel associations, and the blind man said that now he
understood all those color metaphors!  I've also read about people
associating the voice of musical instruments with specific colors --
trumpet-yellow, clarinet-green, tuba-red.  Seems to chime well with the
vowel-color scheme.


/BP

  B.Philip Jonsson  mailto:melroch@mail.com
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