The student in my Harmony class was dismissive and condescending. That’s totally unbelievable, it’s stupid. You say that different keys bring up colors for you? Nonsense! Impossible. Is this some kind of joke? The notion of tonal synaesthesia sounded like the ravings of a deluded lunatic to this composition major. His sneering dismissal turned to sputtering outrage when several other students in the class told him that they tended to associate colors with not only key centers, but also individual pitches. All in all, he had a really bad morning.
Aware as I was that this particular comp major was getting by mostly on brains and arrogance rather than musical talent—of which he was conspicuously lacking—I pointed out to him that synaesthesia has been studied by psychologists for well over a century, and that tonal synaesthesia makes up the lion’s share of the documented incidents. The phenomenon under discussion—tonal-center synaesthesia, or associating non-auditory sensory perceptions, particularly colors, with keys and modes—is rarer but not all that unusual amongst people with absolute pitch. Conservatories being as they are, he was surrounded by folks for whom both tonal and tonal-center synaesthesia had been a fact of life for as long as they could remember. Thus the message to our belligerent composer-wannabe: there really is a Santa Claus, kid, but he ain’t coming to your house.
Our class demonstrated all of the most commonly-encountered aspects of tonal-center synaesthesia. First, none of us associated the same set of colors with the same set of keys. Second, none of us had equally strong associations throughout the key spectrum, and in many cases, our synaesthesia applied to selected keys only. Third, all of us had absolute pitch or very nearly so. Fourth, none of us knew how any of it had happened; it had just always been there.
I can present the tonal-center synaesthesia I know best—my own—as a model. My strongest associations have always been with two keys: D Minor, which is blood-red for me, and F Major, a bright cheery green. I associate E Major with bright yellow, albeit less strongly. I have no associations whatsoever with C, G, or A major or minors, although interestingly enough A-flat Major carries a weak connotation of violet. I also associate B Major with light brown and B-flat with a dark, chocolately brown, neither particularly strongly.
I suspect that some of my associations are extrapolations. For example, D Major is bright red to me—but I wonder if that might not be triggered by the original association of D Minor with blood red, a connection I cannot recall ever being without. It would make sense for D Major to be a brighter shade of red than D Minor. I also tend to think of D-flat Major as a rich magenta, again playing off the original D Minor association. Furthermore, E-flat Major is a warm autumnal gold to me, most likely due to an appropriate tonal shift from the bright yellow of E Major, and also due to E-flat Major having such a mellow cast when played by string and wind instruments, as well as being so comfortable a key on the piano. In the F realm, I’m not sure which association came first—the bright green I see for F Major or the moist olive hues for F Minor. Interestingly enough, I retain that same olive moistness for F-sharp Minor.
Certain associations include a tactile element. For pianists, every key presents its own unique topology, as shapes, layouts, and fingerings change to accomodate the configurations possible between seven white and five black keys. Some keys are more comfortable than others, and color associations may reflect those varying degrees of comfort. For example, my shift from bright red for D Major to a warm magenta for D-flat Major could be tactile, as one slightly uncomfortable topology (D Major) gives way to the notably more fluid landscape of D-flat Major.
I am not exclusively limited to color synaesthesia. A few key centers elicit sensations of temperature for me. C-sharp Major is a “hot” key, without a shadow of a doubt, as is E Major. Those associations seem to be largely learned and physical: C-sharp Major is a difficult key for young musicians to learn, hard to read what with all those nasty double-sharps that pop up so frequently. Yet it is enharmonic with D-flat Major, a much easier key to read. I think this results in my sense of a C-sharp Major chord as manifesting more harmonic tension than the same chord notated as D-flat Major. If I have printed music before me, or if I know the spelling of the chords before I hear them, I will inevitably hear the progression C-sharp to D-flat major, even identically voiced, as a quasi-cadence, tension to release. Obviously I cannot be hearing that per se, since without notation I have no way of knowing which is which.
But Beethoven always said he could hear the difference between C-sharp Major and D-flat Major. I’m convinced that he was a tonal-center synaesthete as well. Heck, his choices of key scream color association to me. Consider the symphonies: No. 2 in D Major, No. 9 in D Minor; both reds, one hot and merry, the other dramatic and often brooding. Two in F Major: Nos. 6 and 8, greens both bright and transparent. I would guess that A Major was a somewhat harsh key for Beethoven (as it is for me, although I have no specific color for it) given the abrasive glory of the 7th. E-flat had that same golden-yellow richness for Beethoven that it held for Mozart and Haydn both, given the Eroica.
I discussed color associations with an absolute-pitch colleague of mine. Her color-key combos are different from mine, but just as vivid and compelling to her as mine are to me. And they are just as selective, being limited to certain keys only.
When I was a grad student I was heavily involved with harpsichord and piano both. As it happened in those days the SF Conservatory had on long-term loan a beautiful Flemish harpsichord that required an ‘A’ of 415 rather than the modern 440. Although I loved playing that resonant and sweet-toned harpsichord I was initially thrown by the semitone-off pitch. I would play in C Major, but the music came out in B Major and confused the daylights out of my ear. After a few months of discomfort, my ear adjusted, and before long I was not only fully functional at the semitone-lower ‘Baroque’ pitch, but I could move back to modern pitch on the piano with only a moment’s readjustment. Ever since then, I’ve had a semitone wobble in my absolute pitch—that is to say, my first ‘A’ of the day might be A-flat instead, but I’m never off by more than a semitone (always low, never high), and once I get the ‘A’ set in my head I keep it. That’s the price I paid for being able to play in Baroque pitch, and also to be able to listen to HIP recordings without distress. Before my harpsichord days, you couldn’t deflect my absolute pitch with a sledgehammer.
But here’s a fascinating tidbit: my color associations shift right along with my reference ‘A’. That is, in Baroque pitch D Minor is still blood red, even if it should elicit C-sharp minor associations to my ear. But it doesn’t. D remains red, F remains green, and C, G, and A stubbornly resist color associations in Baroque pitch just as in modern. It seems that for my absolute pitch to have made that accomodation to Baroque pitch, the entire tonal imaging apparatus had to adjust, including my synaesthesia.
Which tells me that this is all learned association, picked up somehow by the brain’s remarkable abilities to make connections. Somewhere along the way, very early in my life, I came to associate blood red with D Minor. Maybe it was a record jacket. Maybe I dreamed the connection. Maybe the emotional associations of blood-red color were triggered by some D Minor pieces I heard—in childhood I was hyper-vulnerable emotionally to even the most trivial music. But at any rate, that color association became inextricably locked up into my tonal imagining mechanisms, and by a very young age at that, given that my ear was already slam-dunk accurate when I was four years old. The powerful gravitational pull of my innate ear swept up my other senses into the mix. It’s actually surprising that I didn’t wind up with more such associations, not only for those color-free tonal centers, but including senses beyond the kinesthetics and occasional temperature gradients I also experience. I never taste tones, for example, although there are documented incidences of people who do.
Fascinating topic. Harvey Sacks devotes an entire chapter to the subject in Musicophilia, and numerous other studies can be found hither and yon. Perhaps I should found a chapter of Tonal-Center Synaesthetes Anonymous, although in this case nobody would be interested in kicking their synaesthesia, but instead would be actively seeking ways to enhance and celebrate it. A twelve-step program designed to promote tonal synaesthesia, spreading the gospel of technicolor music far and wide.