Musical Synaesthesia in Synaesthetes and Its
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MUSICAL SYNAESTHESIA IN SYNAESTHETES AND ITS MANIFESTATION AS A WIDER PHENOMENON c. MARK BEAUMONT. Submitted as part of a PhD assessment by the Department of Music of the University of Sheffield. SEPTEMBER 2003. 1 Acknowledgements While claiming full responsibility for the work contained in this volume, and consequently request that the work be acknowledged as mine when used for future academic research, and permission sought in all other cases, its production would not have been possible without much support, formal and informal, technical and academic and cooperation. While the sources of such assistance are too many to list on this page and while this thesis is no exception to the assertion that every piece of academic writing has its story-of-the-making to tell, I feel it especially appropriate to thank Eric Clarke, my supervisor in the Music Department for his guidance. Second on the list is my gratitude to the many people who have been able to advise me with regards to the various areas that this interdisciplinary work has included. All ideas that were not my own ultimately, of course, came from available sources, but to be able to almost rely on people for inspiration has been a countless asset throughout these years. Finally, every thesis relies on outcomes which in tum generally depend on empirical research. This requires people who used to be called 'subjects' but who we now refer to as 'participants'. I believe that this change of language is a good thing since it encourages experimenters not to take them for granted and to ensure that their experience in the experimentation room is a possible one. I hope that I have succeeded in this with all my participants (five invaluable contributors with synaesthesia, 20 for. the semantic differentiation study, 53 for the key colour experiment and sometimes numbers in the hundreds for minor surveys) and am very grateful to them. I give special thanks to the five synaesthetes that I worked with, Tony Bennett, Aiden & Andy Cassidy, Stuart Haynes, and Stephen Hoskisson. Mark Beaumont 5th September 2003 Northampton. JtA . INDEX SUMMARY Page 3 Chapter 1. INTRODUCIlON. Page 5 Chapter 2. WHAT IS COLOUR? Page 9 Chapter 3. WHAT DOES COLOUR MEAN TO US? Page 25 Chapter 4. THE GENERAL USE AND SYMBOLISM OF COLOUR Page 34 Chapter 5. VISUAUMUSIC CONNECTIONS IN VISUAL ART. Page 44 Chapter 6. A SURVEY OF KEY USAGE. Page 59 Chapter 7. KEY/COLOUR EXPERIMENT. Page 91 Chapter 8. THE QUALITY OF COMPOUND SOUND AND ITS RELATION TO COLOUR Page 109 Chapter 9. COLOUR AND NON·VISUAL STIMULI. Page 123 Chapter 10. THE NATURE OF METAPHOR Page 137 ·Chapter II .. SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL EXPERIMENT. Page 160 , Chapter 12. THEORIES OF SYNAESTHESIA. Page 175 Chapter 13. CASE STUDIES OF TWO MUSICAL CHROMAESTHETES. Page 185 Chapter 14. OTHER SYNAESTHETES. Page 201 Chapter 15. EXPERIMENT IN VISUAL DEPRNA nON AND AUDIO-VISUAL SYNAESTHESIA Page 213 Chapter 16. CONCLUSION. Page 247 References Page 259 Appendix Page 267 2 SUMMARY This thesis has been titled 'Musical Synaesthesia m Synaesthetes and its Manifestation as a Wider Phenomenon', in order to give an indication of the broadness of the subject area that it addresses. It looks at ways in which types of association normally associated with one of the five sensory channels sometimes make connections with, and produce stimulation of, any combination of the other four. Although the thesis touches on most known perspectives of this large topic, all of which are interconnected, it focuses on just two of these areas. Firstly, it deals with a condition which affects a small minority of the population known as ·synaesthesia'. 'Synaesthesia' is derived from the Greek combining syn meaning to combine and aesthises meaning perceived by the senses. This word was coined in the 1870s, probably by Fechner. People with synaesthesia experience involuntary sensations that do not exist in the external world but which are triggered by sensations which belong to another sensory channel. There are, for example, synaesthetes that who hear sounds as colours, taste textures, or hear odours. The first of these three examples is, by far, the most common type of synaesthesia and is especiaJIy relevant to this thesis since it deals with musical synaesthesia Musical synaesthesia usually involves strong and specific colours in connection with musical sounds. This introduces the thesis' second focal point, that of music. Coloured sensations in the absence of coloured stimuli are especially frequent as responses to music and musical material is used in this thesis to test such responses. It seems likely that Messiaen was a synaesthetic musician, and possible that Skryabin was also. 3 In a more general way, the notion of music being coloured is not confined exclusively to synaesthetes. Numerous non-synaesthetic people maintain that certain keys, intervals, chords or sounds of certain musical instruments are coloured. Given that there are more non-synaesthetic people than there are synaesthetic people, it seems likely that the former group are predominantly responsible for the gravitation towards coloured music and towards musical paintings during the second half of the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the term 'synaesthesia' might arguably be used to define this phenomenon with as much validity as it is used to define the neurological condition. It is from the above standpoint that we can gain a greater understanding of a certain prevalent spirit of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century's 'age of synaesthesia'. Although this standpoint is not convincing from a neurological point of view, it is relevant to the study of the internal worlds of several musicians, writers and painters. This is my justification for writing about synaesthesia as a wider phenomenon. 4 1. Introduction. References to images belonging to one sensory channel to refer to attributes of another sensory channel are far more common than we might at first think. How often, for example, do we refer to colours as being loud or sounds as being dull or heavy or, for that matter, ·seeing' what someone means (when we mean that we understand what they mean)? When we make these references we imply the existence of some uniting factor between the two stated properties despite their never being experienced by the same sense. In short we are making ·metaphor' (the subject of Chapter 10 of this thesis). For a sman minority of people, however, experience of shimmering sounds, heavy colours or some other cross modal entity is a powerful reality. When such people encounter certain stimuli, which may be visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, or concepts such as numbers or days of the week, they have other sensations associated with another sensory channel that are not triggered directly by external reality but are triggered internally in addition to the normally triggered sensations. Such people have a condition known as ·synaesthesia' (noun ·synaesthete'). Synaesthesia is thought to affect one person in 25000 according to Cytowic (Cytowic 1997), while other estimates vary about fivefold either way. The condition is not disabling to a normal lifestyle in the majority of cases but it must surely make the subjective experience of being a synaesthete quite different from that of the rest of us. The pseudo-hallucinatory sensations, for which I will use Cytowic's terminology ·secondary sensations', can also be those associated with anyone of, or any combination of the senses: A synaesthete might, for example, taste shapes, see sounds or have coloured odours. 5 The chapter in the thesis concerning neurological theories of synaesthesia (Chapter 12) elaborates on the essential qualities of the condition but a brief summaI)' which distinguishes synaesthetic experience from what Jewanski (2001) called 'intermodal construction' and 'associative thinking' will suffice here. Firstly, synaesthesia is innate, never acquired. Secondly, cross modal secondary sensations remain constant over a person's lifetime. Thirdly they will always occur and the synaesthete has no voluntaty control over them. The fourth point is that the triggers, or primal)' sensations, are unique to each synaesthete, and the final point is that synaesthesia feels totally real yet qualitatively quite different from external reality. It is, of course, impossible to tell for certain whether anyone person's subjective experience of the world resembles that of the next person's in any way at all. It can be ascertained, however, that we are all constantly creating subjective meaning out of the concrete reality in which we live. This rather esoteric issue highlights one of the greatest barriers to our understanding of synaesthesia: the subjective awareness that makes all of our subjective interpretation possible is quite likely to be a product of preconscious processing. Cytowic provides evidence suggesting that synaesthesia is thought to occur not only in synaesthetes but also in non-synaesthetes who are unaware of synaesthetic experience because their higher cortical functions block it out.· In order to obtain a clear idea of what I mean by 'subjective construction', it is helpful to explore a form of such 'mental embroidel)" that occurs in most people rather than one confined to a small minority of cases, as synaesthesia does. The example that some of the first few chapters of this thesis deals with is colour. The phenomenon that begins in the eyes as relative stimulation ratios of three types of cone (which Land found varied to a large degree in any case) is then translated into this subjective construct caned 'colour' which affects the emotions directly and has a vast expanse of non-verbal meaning for each one of us. 6 Colour is of further relevance as an introduction to the study of synaesthesia, since colour constitutes part of the secondary experience in the majority of synaesthetes (the triggers are usually sounds).