SYNESTHESIA AND ART

Master’s Thesis of the Student:

Konstantina Orlandatou
Master Degree Course: Multimedia Composition
Academy of Music and Theater of Hamburg
Class of Professor: Dr. Georg Hajdu

March 2009

Konstantina Orlandatou
Weberstrasse 14, 22083, Hamburg
Tel: 040 27879794, 015222601119
Email: konstantina.orlandatou@hfmt-hamburg.de
Index:

Page

Part I: Synesthesia a neurological phenomenon

1. Definition of Synesthesia……………………………………………. 5

2. Historical background……………………………………………….. 5

3. Categories, Types and Criteria of Synesthesia………………………. 8

4. What are the causes of Synesthesia………………………………….. 11

Part II: Synesthesia in Art

1. Music………………………………………………………………… 18

2. Painting / Visual Arts………………………………………………... 28

3. Literature / Poetry…………………………………………………… 33

4. Synesthesia as an artistic concept…………………………………… 36

Conclusion………………………………………………………………... 42

Bibliography……………………………………………………………… 43

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Preface:

I first found out about synesthesia, when I was doing some research on the internet
about the Russian painter Kandinsky. After reading his books “Concerning the
Spiritual in Art” (1911) and “Point and Line to Plane” (1926) I wanted to find
more information about his life and achievements.
In an article it was stated that he was most likely a synesthete. At that moment I
had no idea what this meant, so I started searching, what constitutes synesthesia
and what the termreally means.
It was most fascinating to read articles, in which synesthetes speak about their own
experiences and the kind of associations they do when they hear or see something.
But what happens when an artist is synesthete? It is also interesting to observe
how artists express this phenomenon in their art: Scriabin, Messiaen, Kandinsky
had developed their own artistic language, in every case different but all coming
from the same source, synesthesia.
Synesthesia was known to the psychological and medical community for over 200
years. Thomas Woolhouse, an English ophthalmologist, described a case of a blind
man, who when perceiving sound – had colored visions (Castel, 1725, 1735). This
is considered the first medical reference to synesthesia. Also Isaac Newton in 1704
tried to mathematically correlate the energy of sound and color. Although the
phenomenon was abandoned by the scientific community in the middle of the 20th
Century (there was no interest for further research), in the 1980’s, Richard
Cytowic brought it back to the scientific mainstream, where it is now seen as
crucial to basic theories of how the brain works.
In this thesis I will attempt to explain what synesthesia is, why it happens, (Part I)
and how synesthetic artists were and are influenced by this phenomenon
throughout the years (Part II).
Konstantina Orlandatou

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 Part I
S y n e s t h e s i a : a n e u r o l o g i c a l p h e n o me n o n

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1. Definition of Synesthesia

The word Synesthesia comes from the combination of two ancient Greek words:
συν (syn = union) + αίσθησις (aesthesis = sense), meaning fusion of the sense.

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon, an involuntary process that occurs

when the real information of one sense leads to a perception in another one. For
example people with synesthesia (called synesthetes) can “see” the color of
someone’s voice or complain that letters and numbers in advertisement spots or
magazines have the “wrong” color.
This involuntary joining can happen between all senses: hearing, vision, taste,
touch, smell and movement. One synesthete can hear music and at the same time
can associate a certain posture or for another synesthete an optical stimulus may
trigger a smell.

Statistically is really difficult to estimate how many cases of synesthesia exist in a

population. According to Cytowic the estimate is 1 in 100000 persons. According
to Simner et al. (2006) the number is 1 in 23 persons.

2. Historical Background

Already in the antiquity Greek philosophers have shown interest in the human
senses and how human perception works. Democritus was supporting the theory
that the mind was controlled by the soul. “All mind events were events of the soul.
All sensation was therefore reduced to motion”1.

1
Richard E. Cytowic: Union of the sense, Springer Verlag, 1989, p.70

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Plato on the other hand was focusing to find the physical attributes of sensation.
But it was Aristotle in 350BC who differentiated between the particular and the
common senses. He was also referring to the Soul as the “controller” of the brain.
In “On Sense and the Sensible” he wrote that stimuli may come from the outside
world in different channels but they are not separated from our inner sense
experience.
“If then, as is the fact, the Soul with one part perceives Sweet, with another,
White, either that which results from these is some one part, or else there is no
such one resultant…………… We must conclude, therefore, that there is, as has
been stated before, some one faculty in the soul with which the latter perceives all
its percepts, though it perceives each different genus of sensibles through a
different organ.”2

In the late 18th and early 19th century synesthesia was intensively researched. Carl
Stumpf (1848 – 1936) a very well known psychologist, for his time, tried to
categorize cases of synesthesia between touch and hearing.
In 1871 the french poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891) helped with his book
“Voyelles” (vowels) to awake the public awareness of synesthesia. For Rimbaud
every vowel creates multiple images, visual and acoustic impressions. A is black
and represents horror, E is white and represents the women and the innocence, I is
red for passion, U is green and associated with the circle and O is blue for silence:

2
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sense.2.2.html

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 A
horror, fear

E
women, innocence

I
passion

U
circle

O
silence

In her work about Color hearing in 1927 Annelies Argelander asked people to
relate colors to sounds of different pitch. She found out that the association of
colors to sounds was based on consciousness that could be “trained” to categorize
feelings. She came to the conclusion that there are two factors that can influence
this process:
1. there is a parallel between frequency shifting of the sound, from deep to
high, to how intensely the sounds are perceived, and
2. the people could concentrate more on the region of middle octaves.
According to Argelander there are two causes: the sensitivity of hearing and
the pitch of the human voice.
Although Argelanders work was published in the beginning of the 20th century,
her results are still up-to-date.

In his book “Das Doppelempfinden in der Geistesgeschichte” (1929) the

psychologist Albert Wellek described the term Synesthesia:
“Under synesthesia we understand every psychological process, in which different
senses are joined together and are parallel activated, thus every possible
combination of senses in every imaginable extent of the definition.”3 Wellek
interpreted intermodal analogy as a type of “primal” synesthesia. Intermodal
3
Albert Wellek : Das Doppelempfingen in der Geistegeschichte, in :Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissentschaft 23 (1929), s.19

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analogy is a conscious allocation of different sensory stimuli, like sound or color.
These allocations are based on a common reference that can be a cultural analogy
or an association. The different organs (of the senses), beyond the relevant
information, trigger also emotional qualities. In intermodal analogies, the person
usually consciously performs the “wiring” (connection) between the senses, so to
develop such additional impressions, analogies or associations between different
sense qualities.
Stanley Smith Stevens was a leading figure in the field of experimental
psychology in the middle of the 20th century. In 1957, he made an experiment in
which people where asked to determine the volume of sounds of different pitch by
pressing a dynamometer. In another case the observer is asked to match loudness
by manipulating the luminance of a light source until its brightness matches the
level of the target loudness.
These kinds of experiments are based on the so-called “cross-modal matching”: a
scaling method used in psychophysics in which an observer matches the apparent
intensities of stimuli across two sensory modalities. The method is successful and
gives precise results.
The German psychologist Heinz Werner wrote in 1966 in his book “Intermodale
Qualitäten” that synesthesia is a “voluntary combinations of two or more
heterogeneous sense – qualities, regardless of the fact that these qualities are of
moderate perception.”4

3. Categories, Types and Criteria of Synesthesia

There are two categories of synesthesia: genuine and cognitive. The mechanism of
synesthesia is different in both categories. In the genuine synesthesia, a stimuli as

4
Heinz Werner: Intermodale Qualitäten, in: Handbuch der Psychologie, W.Metzger (Hg.) Band. 1,
Göttingen 1966, p.278

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input can trigger one or more senses, whereas in the cognitive synesthesia , the
person categorizes letters, numbers, or names into groups and at the same time
gets a kind of sensory addition, such as smell, color, or flavor. The most common
forms of this kind of synesthesia can involve colored letters, colored numbers,
colored sounds. The combination of sound with sight is called “colored hearing”
or “chromesthesia”.

Cytowic speaks about idiopathic synesthetes. An idiopathic synesthete is a person

that has synesthesia but the cause of it is unknown. There is no pathological
explanation, why the patient develops synesthesia. Cytowic separates idiopathic
synesthetes in two categories, those with:
1. monomodal form , in which colored shapes are associated with spoken
words
2. polymodal form, in which voice, music, sights, smells might be all seen,
felt and tasted

In case of non – idiopathic synesthesia, there is an etiology (or different factors)

that produces synesthesia. In non – idiopathic synesthesia belong following
phenomena:
• Seizure induced synesthesia: this type is experienced during an epileptic
seizure. It is caused by electrical discharge (seizure) in the limbic region of
the brain. Electrical stimulation of the temporal cortex (see page 10) evokes
synesthesia.
• Drug induced synesthesia: this type induces from drug consumption like
LSD and, thus, occurs relatively infrequent.
• Neuron Degeneration or brain damage induced: it may be caused from loss
of certain neurons (for example from a stroke) which make up sensory
deprivation or caused from brain stem lesions.

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The majority of synesthetes are women (approximately 72%).

Today we know of 54 different forms of synesthesia. The table that follows below
shows which forms are more common and which are rare. In some cases there is
no sufficient data:

Graphemes (numbers & letters)
colors = 65.1%

Time units
colors = 23.3%
Musical sounds
colors = 18.8%
General sounds
colors = 14.7%
Phonemes
colors = 8.5%
Musical notes
colors = 8.4%
Number form = 7.6%
Smells
colors = 6.7%
Tastes
colors = 6.4%
Personalities
colors (“auras”) = 6.3%
Sound
tastes = 5.4%
Pain
colors = 5.2%
Sound
touch = 4.0%
Touch
colors = 3.8%
Grapheme personification = 3.6%
Vision
tastes = 2.8%
Vision
sounds = 2.5%
Emotions
colors = 2.5%
Temperatures
colors = 2.3%
Orgasm
colors = 2.1%
Lexeme
taste = 2.1%
Object personification = 1.6%
Sounds
smells = 1.6%
Vision
touch = 1.6%
Vision
smells = 1.3%
Touch
tastes = 1.1%
Sound
temperatures = 0.6%
Tastes
touch = 0.6%
Touch
sounds = 0.6%
Personalities
smells = 0.5%
Smells
sounds = 0.5%
Smells
touch = 0.5%
Sounds
kinetics = 0.5%
Kinetics
sounds = 0.3%
Touch
smell = 0.3%
Emotion
taste = 0.2%
Musical notes
tastes = 0.2%
Personalities
touch = 0.2%
Smells
tastes = 0.2%
Vision
Temperatures = 0.2%
Emotion
smell = 0.1%

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 Tastes
sounds = 0.1%
Tastes
temperatures = 0.1%
Emotion
pain = 0.1%
Emotion
smell = 0.1%
Emotion
temperature = 0.1%
Emotion
touch = 0.1%
Smells
temperatures = 0.1%
Temperatures
sounds = 0.1%
Temperature
taste = 0.1%
Touch
temperatures = 0.1%
Vision
kinetics = 0.1%

Source : http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/html/types.htm

It is difficult to diagnose if a person has idiopathic or non – idiopathic synesthesia.

In his research Cytowic came to the conclusion that there are 5 diagnostic criteria
for idiopathic synesthesia:

1. synesthesia is involuntary but elicited

2. synesthesia is projected, mostly perceived close to the face
3. synesthetic percepts are durable and discrete
4. synesthesia is highly memorable
5. synesthesia is emotional

According to Cytowic if a person meets 4 of the 5 criteria, it is established that the

subject has idiopathic synesthesia.

4. What are the causes of Synesthesia?

In the 19th century scientists thought that Synesthesia was caused by a defect or
immature nervous system and the circuitry of the brain didn’t function properly.
Such kinds of theories were formularized from Bleuler & Lehmann (“Degeneracy
Theory”, 1881) and Downey (“Compensation Theory”, 1912). The activity of the
brain was suppressed with relative activation of the emotions and that could be a

11
“linkage” to the synesthetical perception. These theories also suggested that
synesthesia occurred in the central nervous system (CNS).

Before we start to explain what might be the causes of synesthesia, we will make a
reference to how human brain works and which parts are responsible for specific
processes and functions.

The brain is organized in three sections:

1. the cerebral cortex

2. the central core
3. the limbic system

Cerebral Cortex:

The cerebral cortex directs the brain’s higher cognitive

and emotional functions. It is divided in two halves,
the cerebral hemispheres. Every hemisphere has four
subsections, the lobe sections and these are:

• frontal lobe
• occipital lobe
• parietal lobe
• temporal lobe

The frontal lobe is positioned, as the name suggests, in the front part of the
hemisphere. It assists the cognitive activities (decision making) and relates present
to the future through decisive behavior (setting goals, planning). The occipital lobe

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(in the back part of the brain) processes the visual information and passes the
processed information to the parietal and temporal lobe. Parietal lobe is
responsible for the sensory processes, the attention, as well as the language
comprehension. The auditory perception, language comprehension and visual
recognition are located in the temporal lobe.

Central Core:

The central core consists of five main regions that

monitor the activities of everyday life such as
breathing, sleeping, heart beat and balance. Here
the first stage of sensory information processing
takes place.

• The thalamus translates the sensory information and determines if

something is good or bad. It forwards information to the area of cerebral
cortex.
• The pons is responsible for our dreams and waking from sleep.
• The cerebellum coordinates our body movements, the posture of our body
and our balance (equilibrium).
• The reticular formation makes the cerebral cortex attentive to new
stimulation and to remain alert when we sleep.
• The medulla is the center of our breathing, waking, sleeping and the heart
beat.

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Limbic System:

The limbic system is concerned with emotional experience

and forming memories. Here, conscious experiences are
associated with emotions. The limbic system has three
regions:

• The hippocampus controls emotions, the process of learning and memory.

It influences other cortical regions of the brain.
• The amygdala controls aggression, eating, drinking and sexual behavior.
• The hypothalamus is connected to the autonomous nervous and endocrine
systems. It observes and controls the glucose and salt levels in the blood,
the pressure and, of course, the hormones. Limbic stimulations are here
integrated.

There are many theories supporting that the limbic system and its regions,
especially hippocampus, have significant influence on synesthetic processes.

In his book “Union of the Senses”, Cytowic states that there are two reasons why
hippocampus is the most likely part of the brain involved in the production of
synesthesia:

1. there are persons who have synesthetic experiences during epileptic

seizures, without being synesthetes and
2. hypothalamus is able to receive signals from different areas of the brain.
During sensory neural processing it is possible that information from
different stimuli (color, shape, texture) might be recombined in limbic area.
In Cytowic’s researches show that conscious perception of synesthesia
causes fluctuations of blood flow in the hippocampus.

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But what really happens in the brain during synesthesia? Let’s say that we have
the form of colored letters or numbers. How we percept an image? The lens of our
eye focuses an image on the retina, a membrane in the back of the eye. The retina
transforms the light into neuronal signals which are transmitted through the optic
nerve to our brain in different areas. The information about color are transmitted to
an areal and from there to other color processing areas like TPO (temporo –
parieto – occipital) or posterior cerebral area, another name for the occipital lobe.
It is known that the signal processing for letters and numbers are located in the
areal V4. Intersection, cross activity or feedback between these sections could
generate this type of synesthesia (colored letters/numbers). This process could
explain also the color – hearing synesthesia, since the center of hearing is located
near the TPO region.
There is also the possibility that neural cortex briefly stops functioning and in the
same time fusion of senses are permitted, but somehow this process never arises
consciousness. The forms that the synesthetes describe are very similar to those of
middle sleep state before or after sleep (Eichmeier / Höfer, 1974).
Another theory states that synesthesia might happen, when some areas of the brain
stop develop properly since infanthood. The fact that most synesthetes have more
than one type of synesthesia and that there are different combinations of senses
involved, support this theory.
In 1988 Charles and Daphne Maurer proposed that every newborn is synesthetic.
In later publications Daphne Maurer and Catherine J. Mondloch (Maurer, 1993;
Maurer & Mondloch, 1996) suggested the neonatal synesthesia hypothesis. It is
stated that all babies up to 4 months of age are synesthetic because of immature
cortex. Most of their cortical modules do not function sufficiently and the baby
can not differentiate stimuli from modalities. The baby recognizes patterns but it is
unaware which modality produced the pattern. Sensory input, such as sound,
triggers both auditory and visual experience. Why synesthesia disappears in most
of the newborns after the period of approximately 4 months it is not clear. A

15
possible explanation is that the cortex starts developing properly and the baby can
differentiate stimuli.
Most recent theories come to the conclusion that synesthesia occurs in the left
hemisphere, it is not cortical and involves temporal lobe and limbic structures.

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 Part II
S y n e s t h e s i a i n Ar t

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In this chapter we are going to examine how synesthetic artists reflect their
experiences in their art, and how other artists (non synesthetic) were fascinated by
this phenomenon.
The German philosopher Gernot Böhme wrote: “In the art of the 20th century
“Synesthesia” understood as the primary phenomenon of perception, namely the
perception of an atmosphere, that is not memorable, but is comprehended quasi as
intuition”.5
Atmosphere, as a composition of the effects of different factors’, is certainly a
concept that is most used in connection with the term of synesthesia in the art.

1. Music

The most common art form, in which synesthesia is more often expressed is
music. Many composers were inspired by their synesthetic perceptions and used it
as material in their work.

The Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky – Korsakov (1844 –

1904) was synesthete, who experienced colors for musical
keys. For example C was white, D was yellow etc. The table
below shows the combination of musical keys to colors.

5
Gernot Böhme: Atmosphäre, Essays zu einer neuen Ästhetik, 1995

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 C white
D yellow
Eb sparkling sapphire
E dark blue - grey
F green
G rich gold
A rosy colored

Another Russian composer who combined color and music

was Alexander Scriabin (1872 – 1915). One of his
representative works is “Prometheus”: The Poem of Fire,
op.60, (1910) for orchestra, piano, choir and “clavier à
lumières" known as Luce (meaning light in Italian), an
instrument that did not exist at the time. According to Scriabin the instrument
should be a mute keyboard that could control colored light in the form of beams or
clouds, flooding the concert hall.
Scriabin was intense influenced by theosophy, which holds that all religions
belong to the “Spiritual Hierarchy”, helping humanity to evolve to greater
perfection. For the title page he took a picture by the Belgian painter Jean Delville,
also a theosophist.

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In the score, Luce is the first instrument from above. It points out the centre of the
sound of the first chords in fourths. The three main parts of the piece, exposition,
development and recapitulation have colors assigned to them:
• exposition
blue
• development
orange
• recapitulation
blue
The notation for Luce consists of two parts. The lower part is the color base or
background, an atmosphere of light intended to bathe the concert hall. The upper

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part is the active, constantly moving change of color spots. Ii indicates a new color
for each new chord or key. The intensity of the lights follows the dynamics of the
music. The table below shows which color represents which note:
C
red
Db
violet
D
yellow
Eb
grey
E
blue
F
green
F#
blue (bright)
G
orange – pink
Ab
purple
A
green
Bb
grey
B
blue

In the first 50 bars of the piece the background is light blue (lower part of Luce)
whereas the spot color (upper part) changes more often, from green to red or from
green to grey. A graphic representation of this part follows below:

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Scriabin thought that the light should direct the emotional intensity of the music.
The first performance with light took place in New York, in 20th March 1915, in
absence of the composer. For the performance the engineer Alexander Moses
constructed a table with electric bulbs but with little ecstatic effect. The light was
projected to a canvas above the orchestra. For the technical realization a console
was used. This console was connected to electric bulbs and the light of the bulbs
was filtered by curtains, giving the effect that the light was beaming all over the
canvas. Till now there has been no satisfying performance of the piece.
As a matter of fact “Prometheus” was a preliminary experiment for the composer,
who planed another work called “Mysterium”. “Mysterium” was a work in which
music, poetry, dance and colored light were to be combined. Unfortunately the
work was never completed.
In most of his other works Scriabin used his own color system based on the circle
of fifths. The colors were arranged depending on their location on the color
spectrum.

Source : median.shiftingplanes.org

For Scriabin, a note does not correspond to a color, but, rather, every color has its
specific scale key. He does not recognize a difference between major or minor
tonalities, for example C Major – C minor.
Whether Scriabin was a real synesthete, in terms of Cytowic’s criteria, is still up to
debate.

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 Amy Beach (1867 – 1944) was an American pianist and
composer. At the beginning of the 20th Century (1900 – 1920)
she was quite popular. She was the first successful American
female composer of large-scale art music. Beach was a
synesthete, who had perfect pitch and used colors to describe
musical keys.
"Other interesting stories about Amy's musical personality and her astounding
abilities as a prodigy are recounted in almost all previous biographical writings.
One such story is Amy's association of certain colors with certain keys. For
instance, Amy might ask her mother to play the 'purple music' or the 'green music.'
The most popular story, however, seems to be the one about Amy's going on a trip
to California and notating on staff paper the exact pitches of bird calls she
heard".6
"Amy's mother encouraged her to relate melodies to the colors blue, pink, or
purple, but before long Amy had a wider range of colors, which she associated
with certain major keys. Thus C was white, F-sharp black, E yellow, G red, A
green, A-flat blue, D-flat violet or purple, and E-flat pink. Until the end of her life
she associated these colors with those keys".6

The well known French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908 –

1992) was experiencing mild synesthesia. During an interview in
1976 to reporter Claude Samuel he stated: “I am ... affected by a
kind of synopsia, found more in my mind than in my body, which
allows me, when I hear music, and equally when I read it, to see
inwardly, in the mind's eye, colors which move with the music,

6
Brown, Jeanell Wise. 1994. Amy Beach and Her Chamber Music: Biography, Documents, Style.
Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.

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and I sense these colors in an extremely vivid manner... For me certain complexes
of sound and certain sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them in
full knowledge of this.”7
Messiaen speaks first about color and then about music. In many of his
compositions, such as “Couleurs de la cite céleste”, “L’ascension”, and “Des
canyons aux étoiles”, Messiaen used sound to create musical landscapes. The
colors play a significant role to the functionality and symbolism of his works. He
associated his system of modes with colors. He had a “chromatic” tempered
system: the modes of limited transposition, which he used and associated with
mathematical organization. Every mode had for Messiaen a different color and a
chord stayed for a specific color. He used a basic rhythmic pattern, which he often
permutated during a piece, a method that gave him a big variety of rhythmical
combinations.
In the table below are shown the 7 modes of limited transposition:

7
Samuel, Claude. 1994 (1986). Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color. Conversations with Claude Samuel.
Translated by E. Thomas Glasow. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press.

24
For example for Messiaen the second mode of limited transposition is a mix of
violet, blue, purple and white.
By Messiaen’s descriptions, the musicologist Jonathan Bernard, describes 3 types
of color categories. The first type is the monochromatic, in which colors are
simple: red, green or white. The second is more complex. In this case two colors
are mixed or blurred with each other, for example there is the combination of
orange – blue or grey – rose. The third type combines more than two colors but in
a different form. For example there may be a dominant color that is stripped or
flecked by other colors. In some cases Messiaen elaborates complicated
descriptions, such as “transparent sulphur yellow with mauve reflections and little
patches of Prussian blue and brown purplish – blue”8.

8
Bernard, Jonathan “Messian’s Synesthesia, The Correspondence between color and sound. Structure in
his music”, in Music Perception, 1 No.4 (1986); 41 - 68

25
In the last of his eight piano Preludes (“Préludes”, 1928 – 29), he describes the
second theme as “blue – orange in its first presentation, green – orange in its
second presentation”8.
“..the green of the Japanese pines, the white and gold of the Shinto temple, the
blue of the sea and the red of the Torii…..That’s what I wanted to translate almost
literally into my music”8. That’s how Messiaen described the colors of a Japanese
landscape in his orchestral work “Sept Haikai” (1962).
Messiaen did not write a catalog analyzing the colors behind every of his
compositions, but for four of his modes of limited transposition he did attribute
colors consistently throughout his music. It is difficult to understand exactly his
color hearing, since he made different variations of his modes or mixed different
transposition of a mode, but we can definitely say that he used his synesthesia as a
pure source of inspiration and the basis of his compositional material. In contrast
to Scriabin, who perceived notes in simple colors – red, orange or violet -
Messiaen described his musical landscapes with much more details using more
complex color combinations, a fact that makes us to believe that Messiaen was an
idiopathic synesthete.

One of the most well known composers of the 20th Century

György Ligeti (1923 – 2006) was a synesthete. Although Ligeti
did not write specific combinations between music and color,
he often talked about his synesthesia and described many of his
experiences. We can safely assume that he had idiopathic
synesthesia.
“I am inclined to synaesthetic perception. I associate sounds with colors and
shapes. Like Rimbaud, I feel that all letters have a color. Major chords are red or
pink, minor chords are somewhere between green and brown. I do not have
perfect pitch, so when I say that C minor has a rusty red – brown color and D
minor is brown this does not come from the pitch but from the letters C and D. I

26
think it must go back to my childhood. I find, for instance, that numbers also have
colors; 1 is steely grey, 2 is orange, 5 is green. At some point these associations
must have got mixed, perhaps I saw the green number 5 on a stamp or on a shop
sign. But there must be some collective associations too. For most people the
sound of trumpet is probably yellow although I find it red because of its
shrillness”9.
Other musicians known for their synesthesia are:
• the composer and pianist Duke Ellington (1899 – 1974) who has timbre –
color synesthesia,
• the American composer Michael Torke born in 1961, who reported that
one of his types is colored time units (days of the week, years, and such)
and he has composed Color Music in 1991,
• the French pianist Helene Grimaud, born in 1969, who reports that one of
her type is seeing numbers in color (graphemes → color) and another is
perceiving music in colors (music → color). "It was when I was eleven,
and working on the F sharp major Prelude from the first book of Bach's
Well-tempered Clavier - I perceived something that was very bright,
between red and orange, very warm and vivid: an almost shapeless stain,
rather like what you would see in the recording control-room if the image
of sound were projected on a screen. But as numbers had always had
colours for me - two was yellow, four was red, five was green - and as I
have always found music evocative, I didn't regard this as unusual. It was
more the idea of colour than colour itself. Certain pieces always project
me into a particular colour-world. Sometimes it's a result of the tonality -
C minor is black, and D minor, the key that has always been closest to me,
being the most dramatic and poignant is blue."10

9
Griffiths, Paul “György Ligeti”, 1983; 58
10
Credo - Hélène Grimaud interviewed by Michael Church,
http://www2.deutschegrammophon.com/special/insighttext.htms?ID=grimaud-credo&DETAIL=1
(31.08.2008)

27
2. Painting / Visual Arts

Painters and visual artists were also influenced by synethesia as much as

composers. Most of them painted pictures expressing exactly what they
experienced when they heard a sound or when they saw a specific color.

One of the most well known painters of abstract art, Wassily

Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) was believed to have synesthesia and
specifically the type of colored hearing. Nina Kandinsky, his
wife, claimed that he loved colors from early childhood and he
distinguished a particular smell and sound for each color.

Kandinsky was also a philosopher and wrote two books, “Concerning the Spiritual
in Art” (1911) and “Point and Line to Plane” (1926), in which he described his
conception of art and his theories about shapes and colors. His first book
“Concerning the Spiritual in Art” is divided in two parts. In the first part he talks
about the role of the artist and his/her responsibility for the society. His/her desire
to create should source from his/her “inner necessity”.
In the second part of his book, Kandinsky explains his theory of color and form.
For Kandinsky the most important object is the triangle. It is more than a form; it
is a symbol that represents spirituality. On top of it sits the artist, whose work is to
show the future to society. It is also the symbol of motion. This object gives the
impression that it moves although it stays still, since its top peak shows the
direction of the movement. In contrast, the circle represents stability and it is the
perfect object, because it has no peaks.

Kandinsky divides the colors in four groups:

28
 Groups of contrast Colors in contrast

1. (dynamic) blue = cold ≠ yellow = warm

2. (static) black = death ≠ white = birth
3. red ≠ green
4. orange ≠ violet

He makes different associations with colors. For example, blue is associated to the
endless, because blue is the color of the sky which is endless. Green is the
peaceful color, because it is a mix of two dynamic colors: blue and yellow. In his
book he wrote that the character of dynamic colors “sounds” better in dynamic
forms, for example yellow in triangle form. Because of his colored hearing
synesthesia he also associated colors with sounds. Below follows a table with his
associations, described in his book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”:

Color Sound / Instrument

yellow
acute ton
blue bright
pipe
dark
violoncello
very dark
contrabass or organ
green
strings
orange
bell or violin in largo movement
violet
English horn, fagot or flute
red bright
fanfare
vermilion
tube
rose
violin
white
silence / pause

In 1896, Kandinsky attended a concert of Wagner’s “Lohengrin”. That was a

critical event for the painter. He described this moment as follows: “The violins,
the deep tone of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time
embodied for me all the power of the prenocturnal hour. I saw all my color in my

29
mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of
me.”11
This experience was an enormous influence for him. He considered music as the
perfect art and therefore he named most of his paintings as Impressions,
Improvisations or Compositions. Every name had a different importance for the
painter. Impression was used as a title when the painting depicted an object of the
“external nature” and it was shown through a specific form, improvisation was a
name used describing an unconscious expression of the “inner nature” and
composition when something was done consciously and on purpose. He would
separate composition into two categories: the simple and the symphonic
composition. Simple composition consisted of a clearly apparent simple form and
symphonic composition was more complex. It consisted of several principal
forms, but the forms were very hard to find, whereby the inner basis assumed a
particularly powerful form.
Kandinsky would also be involved with projects, which combined several art
forms. For example, in 1909 he started working on “Der gelbe Klang”, a stage –
composition, involving music, theater and light, but unfortunately it was never
performed. Later in 1928 he participated in an audiovisual representation of
Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” painting the 16 pictures based on the
music.

On the next page are shown two paintings of Kandinky’s representation:

11
Kandinsky, 1913, p.364

30
 Picture II: Gnomus Picture XVI: The great gate of Kiev
Source: www.kl.pl

David Hockney (1937 - ) is a British painter, most famous for

his contribution to the “Pop Art” movement during the
1960’s. He is well known for his paintings such as We Two
Boys Together Clinging (1961), A Bigger Splash (1967),
Kasmin (1982), and My Mother, Bolton Abbey (1982). In his paintings, he
combined different kinds of shapes and colors, so to give an impression of a
bigger shape. David Hockney also worked with photography and specifically with
photographic collages (so called “joiners”) mostly in the 70’s and 80’s. Most of
these collages depict landscapes in a style of Cubism, since the photos were taken
from different perspectives and in different times. In these works Hockney plays
with vision perception and of course with visual space. In the mid-70’s he started
designing a series of stage designs for Operas by Mozart (Magic Flute), Stravinsky
(The Rake’s Progress), Wagner (Tristan and Isolde), Puccini (Turandot) and
Strauss (Die Frau ohne Schatten). He developed these designs for the program at
New York’s Metropolitan Opera, including also works from Satie, Poulenc and
Ravel.

31
Here are some of the opera sets that Hockney designed:

For the Opera:

The Rake’s Progress
Igor Stravinsky

For the Opera:

Magic Flute
W.A. Mozart

For the Opera:

Tristan und Isolde
Richard Wagner

For the Opera:

Turandot
Giacomo Puccini

32
 For the Opera:
Die Frau Ohne Schatten
Richard Strauss

Source: www.hockneypictures.com

David Hockney was a patient of Richard Cytowic’s. Cytowic speaks about

Hockney’s synesthestic inspiration as an additional process, that helps Hockney
inform his art but it is not the source of his inspiration.
The painter didn’t find anything unusual about his synesthesia until he began
painting these opera sets. The critics, who saw these sets, thought that the colors
and shapes are so strange and the style of them is unlike anything he has ever done
before. In an interview Hockney said that when he listened to the opera music, the
objects were painted somehow automatically.

3. Literature / Poetry

The Russian – American Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977) was

writer and entomologist. His combination of artistic genius and
scientific excellence made him a multi talented person.

He was a multilingual fiction novelist and he wrote novels at

the highest literary level in English, Russian and French. He was a distinguished
entomologist, and during the 1940s, he was responsible for organizing the
butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard

33
University. For his contribution and in honor of his work, the genus Nabokovia
was named after him.
Nabokov was excelled solving chess problems and, therefore, was invited to join
the USA national team. Another characteristic of his was that his memory was so
good and at the same time overloaded, that he often complained about the burden
of not forgetting anything. But the most interesting thing in his case is that he had
highly developed synesthesia.
In his book “The Defense” (1964) Nabokov mentioned how the main character’s
father, who was a writer, found that he was unable to complete a novel that he
planned to write because he was so lost and fascinated by the storyline “starting
with colors”. This may be a reference to what Nabokov also experienced during
writing. Many other similar references were made in his writings and many of his
characters show signs of synesthesia.
In his autobiography “Speak, Memory”, written in 1966, Nabokov describes many
aspects of his synesthesia. He had grapheme – color synesthesia, meaning that he
could see letters in colors. He wrote that his mother, wife (Vera) and son (Dimitri)
were also synesthetes and for example, for Nabokov the letter M was pink, for his
wife Vera it was blue and for his son it was purple.
“The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who
are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are. To
my mother, though this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in
my seventh year, as I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I
casually remarked to her that their colors were all wrong.”12
Nabokov would make a distinction between the letters of different languages,
because every letter has a different pronunciation. For example the English a has
not the same color as the French a. In the same autobiography he described his
colored alphabet as follows:

12
J.E. Harrison (2001), p.131

34
 “I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite
accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the act of my orally
forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English
alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind unless otherwise started) has for
me the tint of weathered woo, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black
group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped).
Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the
whites.”13
A big influence for Nabokov might have been the Russian writer Nikolai
Wassiljewitsch Gogol (1809 – 1852), who according to Nabokov was the first
writer to use other colored descriptions instead of classically used ones, such as:
“the sky was blue”, “the clouds grey”, “the dawn red” etc. He used other colors
such as yellow and violet, and his descriptions were more vivid, for example: the
sky could be pale green at sunrise.
In Nabokov’s novel “Pnin” (1957), Russian professor Gennady Barabtarlo
recorded 238 uses of color terms from amber to yellow via: amber-brown,
cadmium red, emerald-and-grey, magenta, mahogany and mauve, opalescent,
pearly and platinum, slate-gray, snow-and-rose, straw and strontian.
Nabokov once said that we will never know the nature of thought, probably also
referring to how synesthesia really occurs, because of the fact that the
psychologists, who examined him, could not give a scientific explanation about
this phenomenon.

13
J.E. Harrison (2001), p.131

35
4. Synesthesia as an artistic concept

Synesthesia has been a phenomenon throughout the years, which although not
always scientifically researched, has fascinated psychologists as well as artists. On
one hand, for psychologists it was significant to understand how the human brain
functions and, on the other hand for artists it was the inspiration to combine one
art with another by associating, for example, music to color, like the process of
colored hearing in synesthesia. That is why synesthesia is also used metaphorically
as term to describe an artistic concept.
In the 19th century the so-called “Gestalt” theory formed, which supported that the
human brain functions parallel and analog with self-organizing tendencies and the
senses have the capability of form-forming, well known as the “Gestalt” effect. In
the same century the composer Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) was the first to use
the word “Gesamtkunstwerk” (“total artwork”), meaning that visual, auditory and
other sensory elements were combined in one experience. For him Opera
combined more than one art form: music, theater and visual arts. Wagner was
much influenced from the ancient Greek tragedy, and thought that tragedy was the
perfect Gesamtkunstwerk.
The artistic group “Der Blaue Reiter”, founded in 1911 from Wassily Kandinsky
and Franz Marc in Germany (Munich), executed the first synesthetic experiments
in a group of painters, composers and dancers. Artists like Gabriele Münter and
Paul Klee were also involved. The group took its name from a painting by
Kandinsky created in 1903. The concept of the group was focused on the
unification of the arts, by means of Gesamtkunstwerk, as well as the freedom of
expression (abstraction) and spirituality (the ideal of an immaterial art). The group
unfortunately would not last long. During the First World War Kandinsky was
obliged to return to Russia and Franz Marc died in combat.
Kandinsky experimented in “Der Gelbe Klang” with three types of movement:
visual movement (film), musical movement and physical movement (dance). In

36
this project he wrote most of the music with the help of composer Thomas von
Hartmann, who created the form and made the orchestration. Kandisky was not
that satisfied with the classic ballet type of dancing and enlisted the help of dancer
Alexander Sacharoff with whom he experimented with elements from ancient
Greek choreography, used in Tragedy. The whole project was a stage composition
in which he experimented with synesthetic relations between the movements. The
roles involved were: five big human beings, a tenor (behind the stage), a child, a
man, men in comfortable clothes, men in tricots and a choir (behind the stage).
Every group of people would have a different movement on the stage and in every
scene the color would change.
In the same period the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg (1874 – 1951),
would also experiment with his Opera “Die Glückliche Hand“, a combination of
music, theater and light. The piece lasts approximately 20 minutes and consists of
one act of four scenes. Both music and libretto were written by the composer.

The aesthetic influence of cross-sensory associations can also been linked to

Futurism. Futurism was an artistic movement formed in the beginning of the 20th
Century. In 1909 the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinnetti, who was the
founder of the movement, wrote the “Futurist Manifesto”, an article published in
the French daily newspaper “Figaro” in which Marinnetti rejected any sort of
irrelevant or static art of the past and cultural institutions such as museums or
libraries, buildings that should be destroyed. Instead he glorified progress,
originality and innovation and he admired speed, violence and technology. The
movement influenced almost every art form but the most significant achievements
were in visual arts and painting. Many futurist artists wrote different manifests
expressing their futurist philosophy for almost every art. Most important were the
“Manifesto of the Futurist painters” written by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà,
Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini in 1910 and the “Art of Noises”
written by Luigi Russolo in 1913.

37
In the “Manifesto of the Futurist painters” Carrà speaks about a combination of
different senses: hearing (sound, noise), sight (color) and smell steaming from
Marinnetti’s belief that futurist art works should have all the senses employed in
interactive synesthetic ecstasy:
“We Futurists therefore claim that in bringing the elements of sound, noise and
smell to painting we are opening fresh paths. We have already taught artists to
love our essentially dynamic modern life with its sounds, noises and smells,
thereby destroying the stupid passion for values which are solemn, academic,
serene, hieratic and mummified: everything purely intellectual, in fact.
Imagination without strings, words-in-freedom, the systematic use of
onomatopoeia, antigraceful music without rhythmic quadrature, and the art of
noises—these were created by the same Futurist sensibility that has given birth to
the painting of sounds, noises and smells…”.14
The Manifesto explained the principles of Futurism and gave guidelines to young
artists of that time. For example painters should use dynamic forms, such as
sphere, ellipse or cone in vivid colors or a collision of two cones should be painted
with flexible or curving lines. Anything static is rejected such as muted or muddy
colors (brown).
Futurists wanted to bring a new perspective in art, combining more than one
element (sound, color, smell) in their creations, offering new experiences to
society.

Another important artist, the Hungarian pianist and composer Alexander László
(1895 – 1970) combined in his compositions color, light and music. He used the
term “Colorlight Music” to describe his art. Although László had a big success as
a virtuosic pianist, he was interested in combining light with music. From 1922 he
started composing works for piano and colorlight music. It was very important that

14
Carrà, Carlo. 1913. «The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells». Cytowic, Richard E. 1993. The Man
Who Tasted Shapes. New York: Putnam.

38
the audience during the performance could create associations between light,
pictures and music and his purpose was to unite these elements (light, color,
music) in a new artistic synthesis.
When László moved to Germany he worked with the painter Matthias Holl. Holl
painted pictures that during the concert would be shown as slides and they were
the visual basis of the performance. These pictures (picture on the left below,
source: homepage.eircom.net), which nowadays have no
much artistic significance, were abstract and formed a film.
While László played the piano on the stage, behind the
audience his colleagues manipulated a mixing desk (which
was later named colorlight piano) which was connected
with different light sources, which were placed on the stage
with additional four small ramp constructions. These light
sources were four technically changed slide-projectors. The
machines projected Holl’s aquarelles on a canvas in front of
the piano. This experimental art was critically acclaimed by
the press, since it was a total different performance and experience for the
audience.
In November 1925 he published his work for piano and colorlight “11 Preludes,
op.10”, the name of which were colors:
1. U blue 7. Ice blue
2. Yellow 8. White
3. Veil 9. Teal
4. Leaf green 10. Orange
5. Grey 11. Black
6. Red

László collaborated in the 1925 with the well known Filmmaker Oskar Fischinger
(1900 – 1967), who helped László to further develop his color light piano.

39
Fischinger was an abstract animator, who made more than 50 short animated films
and painted 900 canvases. He was the first filmmaker to experiment with different
kind of techniques and material such as wax. He constructed a machine, the Wax
Slicing Machine, that would slice thin layers of wax and with a synchronized
camera he took one frame of the remaining surface of the wax. Some works
created with methods are known as the “Wax Experiments”. He experimented also
with charcoal-on-paper animation and from 1928 to 1932 he created 14 short
abstract films, known as Studies. Fischinger also established the three color
system in animation films and he created a Technicolor-style camera for Bela
Gaspar that he would utilize in his early color films. In 1950 Fischinger invented
the Lumigraph, an instrument similar to color organ. The instrument produced
images by pressing a screen made of rubber, from which only a thin slit emits
light. With a black background nothing could be seen but when something moved
into the thin "sheet" of light, for example by moving a finger-tip around in a circle
in this light field, a colored circle could be seen (colored filters were changed by
the performer). The device was always used accompanying music. Fischinger's
Lumigraph was licensed for use in the 1960's sci-fi film, “Time Travelers”.
Geometrical and abstract forms were the most common objects he used to interpret
music. Although he did not study classical music, sound was very important in his
films and he used a special method to synchronize music with video. In many of
his works he borrowed music of classical composers such as Beethoven and Bach.
Fischinger visualized music by pursuing experiments with drawn synesthetic
sound. He associated the designed forms to every element of music: rhythm,
dynamic, expression. He was the pioneer of “Visual Music” and his work inspired
many filmmakers of the 60’s and 70’s. Most well known animated films:
• Wax Experiments, 1921
• Studies Nr.1 - 14, 1928 - 1932
• Composition in Blue, 1935
• Muratti Private (advertisement), 1935

40
 • Allegretto , 1936
• Motion Painting Nr.1, 1947

On 31st December 1997 American pianist Jeffrey Burns presented in Berlin his
project “The Piano of Light”. In his project Burns realized the concept of
Scriabin’s “clavier à lumières”, an idea that gave him the possibility to have an
interactive and synesthetic performance at the same time. During the performance
the piano was connected to a computer, which interpreted every note to a color.
The computer could control 60 color channels (per MIDI) at the same time and
these colors were projected to a canvas placed on the stage. The relationship
between notes and colors were based on Scriabin’s color system. (see p.21,22)

In the 20th Century most of the modernist movements, such as Expressionism,

Futurism, Dada and Surrealism expanded the boundaries of music, painting,
architecture, drama and poetry. The artists developed new aesthetics and created
conditions for a multi-dimensional autonomy. The artistic fusion of the senses
heightened the quality of artwork in more expressive and impressive ways giving
new perspectives in the art of the 21st Century.

41
Conclusion

Synesthesia is a known phenomenon since the ancient years. Although not

common, many people tried to understand and explain its causes and functions.
Throughout the years the term “synesthesia” obtained two parallel though different
meanings: synesthesia as the neurological phenomenon in which real information
of one sense leads to a perception in another sense, involving cerebral structures
and synesthesia as an artistic experimentation, a source of inspiration, opening
new boundaries of imagination and creativity.
Further scientific research will help us understand the human brain and its
function. Further artistic experimentation can lead to a bigger “fusion” of arts,
which may change the way we conceive and create art.

42
Bibliography:
1. Adler, Hans (Hrsg.) :Synästhesie. Interferenz – Transfer – Synthese der Sinne.
Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2002
2. Bernard, Jonathan: “Messian’s Synesthesia, The Correspondence between color
and sound. Structure in his music”, in Music Perception, 1 No.4 (1986)
3. Böhme, Gernot: Atmosphäre, Essays zu einer neuen Ästhetik, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1995
4. Brown, Jeanell Wise. 1994. Amy Beach and Her Chamber Music: Biography,
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Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 2006
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malerischen Elemente. Bern: Benteli Verlag, 1964
13. Robertson, Lynn C. & Sagiv, Noam: Synesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive
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 16. Wellek, Albert: Das Doppelempfingen in der Geistegeschichte, in :Zeitschrift für
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Internet Sites (last updated 10.03.2009):

1. http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v3/psyche-3-06-vancampen.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
3. http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/e-kes.htm
4. http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/index.htm
5. http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html
6. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sense.2.2.html
7. http://www.thereminvox.com/article/articleview/33/1/5/
8. http://www.musikpaedagogik-
online.de/journal/mub/issues/showarticle,16262.html
9. http://www.learner.org/discoveringpsychology/brain/brain_flash.html
10. http://www.messiaen-festival.de/index.php?id=24
11. http://www.farblicht.ch/music/index.php
12. http://www.oliviermessiaen.net/musical-language/synaesthesia
13. http://consc.net/online/2.5g
14. http://www.gingkopress.com/_cata/_arph/alpco-for.htm
15. http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/html/true_syn_authors.html
16. http://www.synaesthesieforum.de/medien/links/02archiv/
17. http://www.paradise2012.com/visualMusic/musima/

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