Re: Vowelspace vs. Colorspace

Staving John Vertical:
>And now for something completely different:
>
>Do any of you draw associations between vowels and colors? I myself have a
>fairly logical (continuous) correspondence. I remember a few discussions
>with a more heavily synesthetic friend in high school and I think his
>vowels had fairly similar color associations.
>
>Two connenctions which come fairly naturally are [A] = red and [i] =
>white. From this follows that [y] = cyan and [Q] = black. It could be
>expected that yellow would then fall either to [M] or the [a]~[&] region -
>but no, my instinct says that it's [e]. From this would logically follow
>that [&] equals orange, [u] blue, [M] magenta etc.
>
>However, I do have a few associations that run contrary to this system: a
>very strong such one is that black = [9], which seems quite
>out-of-the-blue. (NPI) It also feels that [o] should be lighter than [u],
>not darker. [O] goes even further, it's pastel indigo!
>However, many of the system's predictions do work - besides blue being
>[u], there's [@] as brownish gray and [8] bluish gray. [3] associates as
>dark brown and [6] as dark red, which are probably influence from [9]. [I]
>is beige and [7] sort of iridescent purplish brown. There does not seem to
>be a green vowel at all.
Wow, you're a synaesthete! I'm not one myself, but it's always struck me as
a very interesting and magical way of seeing the world (on Huna, all
wizards are syaesthetes). A while ago I did an evening class on history of
art, and wrote an essay about Wassily Kandinsky, the synaesthetic abstract
artist who saw his paintings as musical compositions. Have you been able to
make use of your experiences in conlanging?

Pete