Synaesthesia
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Published ⋆
Synaesthesia
09/05/2016
By Dimova, Polina
Article DOI
Article
10.4324/9781135000356REM1011-1
Abstract
Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities,
where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another
as in Charles Baudelaire’s simile “perfumes sweet as oboes, green
as prairies.” Synaesthesia captures an already existing tendency in
language to blend the senses as in “sweet melody,“ ”velvety voice,”
or “loud colors,” and psychologists have conducted studies that
show our shared experience of weak audiovisual associations
between low pitch and darker colors, or high pitch and lighter
colors. In a strictly neurological sense, synaesthesia is a perceptual
condition in which the stimulation of one sensory system (for
example, hearing) triggers sensations in another sensory system
(for example, vision). Cross-sensory associations form one-to-one
correspondences that are stable, delicately nuanced, and highly
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individual. For instance, a synaesthete may experience the timbre
of violins as lime green, or the pitch A as burgundy. Synaesthetic
associations occur as involuntary, automatic, and emotional
responses to sensory stimuli. They persist throughout life and
often aid memory: some synaesthetes reliably remember
historical dates thanks to their color-to-number associations. The
prevalence of synaesthesia has been contested over time, with
varying ratios of synaesthetes to nonsynaesthetes of 1 in 2,000, 1
in 100 for colored letters and numbers in recent studies, and even
1 in 23 for all types of synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities,
where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another
as in Charles Baudelaire’s simile “perfumes sweet as oboes, green
as prairies.” Synaesthesia captures an already existing tendency in
language to blend the senses as in “sweet melody,” “velvety voice,”
or “loud colors,” and psychologists have conducted studies that
show our shared experience of weak audiovisual associations
between low pitch and darker colors, or high pitch and lighter
colors. In a strictly neurological sense, synaesthesia is a perceptual
condition in which the stimulation of one sensory system (for
example, hearing) triggers sensations in another sensory system
(for example, vision). Cross-sensory associations form one-to-one
correspondences that are stable, delicately nuanced, and highly
individual. For instance, a synaesthete may experience the timbre
of violins as lime green, or the pitch A as burgundy. Synaesthetic
associations occur as involuntary, automatic, and emotional
responses to sensory stimuli. They persist throughout life and
often aid memory: some synaesthetes reliably remember
historical dates thanks to their color-to-number associations. The
prevalence of synaesthesia has been contested over time, with
varying ratios of synaesthetes to nonsynaesthetes of 1 in 2,000, 1
in 100 for colored letters and numbers in recent studies, and even
1 in 23 for all types of synaesthesia.
The fascination with synaesthesia in modernism began with the
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publication of two seminal poems: Charles Baudelaire’s
“Correspondences” from Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
and Arthur Rimbaud’s “Vowels” (1871). Whereas Baudelaire’s
Symbolist sonnet suggested the universality of synaesthetic
experience, Rimbaud’s poem reveled in the highly individualistic
correspondences between graphemes and colors: “Black A, white
E, red I, green U, blue O.” Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” offers
two interpretations of synaesthesia: first, the mixing of the senses
allows humanity to transcend the fragmentation of the material
world and reach spiritual unity, as “perfumes, colors, and sounds
correspond.” Second, in the sestet of the sonnet, the confusion of
the senses results in the decadent disintegration of symbolic
meaning. Likewise, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s decadent novel A
Rebours (Against Nature) (1884) conflates colors, sounds, tastes,
and fragrances by indulging in nuanced sensory experiences
rather than searching for meaning. Huysmans’s antihero Des
Esseintes experiments with a mouth organ where the taste of
each liqueur recreates the sensation of a specific symphonic
instrument. For instance, the character savors the music of the
violin and the viola, which he hears on his palate in the flavors of
old brandy and rum.
Modernist synaesthesia responded to Aristotle’s notion of the
common sense, believed to integrate our five senses into unified
experiences, and was prefigured by the Romantic melding of
poetry and music. The heyday of artistic synaesthesia coincided
with the fin-de-siècle surge in its scientific study as a
psychophysiological phenomenon, leading to the 1890
International Congress on Color Hearing in Paris. While over two
hundred scientific articles on the subject were published at the
time, by the 1930s the psychoanalytic explorations of the
unconscious were eclipsed by Behaviorism (Cytowic), and
synaesthesia was largely forgotten or dismissed as a
post-Romantic fad.
Synaesthesia sparked the creativity of modernist artists by
engaging with heterogeneous and conflicting cultural and
scientific discourses. In Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau
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infamously denounced synaesthesia as a symptom of mental
disturbance, a sort of relapse into the state of a mollusk. Inspired
by Newton’s analogies between sound and light waves, the
inventor Alexander Wallace Rimington patented in 1893 the
best-known color-organ of his time, which projected colorful lights
across the spectrum band. Rimington relied on the now
discredited fin-de-siècle scientific theory of synaesthesia based on
the allegedly shared frequencies of sound and light vibrations. The
Symbolists exalted synaesthesia as creating the mystical reality of
Baudelaire’s “Correspondences.” In “Richard Wagner and the
Tannhäuser in Paris” (1861), Baudelaire further appropriated
Wagner’s notion of the total artwork, Gesamtkunstwerk for
synaesthesia, by interpreting it not only as a synthesis of the arts
but also as a unity of the senses.
Indeed, according to Wagner’s aesthetic theories, the total artwork
affects the audience on a bodily and emotional level, which allows
access to sensory knowledge beyond reason. Wagner’s music uses
memorable musical motifs, associated with words, images, and
gestures to evoke specific impressions, feelings, objects, and
individuals. These so-called leitmotivs tell the story of the music
drama and, in a synaethetic fashion, trigger immediate,
involuntary, persistent, emotional, and meaningful sensory
responses.
Following the Wagnerian tradition, Oscar Wilde compares his play
Salomé (1891) to a piece of music in its repetitive phrasings. The
heroine blends music, sight, and scent, as she intones while gazing
on Jokanaan’s severed head, “Thy voice was an incense vessel and
when I looked on thee I heard a strange music.” Thus, Salomé
interweaves synaesthesia, Wagnerism, and degeneracy, which
were also gendered queer at the time, as the sexologist Havelock
Ellis compared color hearing to homosexuality in his Studies in the
Psychology of Sex. Sexual Inversion (1897).
Modernist synaesthesia promised to shed light not only on artistic
creativity and human psychology, but also on the mystic cosmos.
The synaesthetic illustrations for Annie Besant’s theosophical
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study Thought-Forms (1901) show how music and emotions can be
visualized as colors and abstract shapes (Fig. 1), thus enabling the
emergence of abstract art. Cosmic imagery of sound and light
vibrations, universal audiovisual correspondences, and colorful
representations of auras pervaded the works of such artists as
Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Scriabin, both of whom claimed
to be synaesthetes, as well as Paul Klee, Hilma af Klint, and Frank
Kupka.
In Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910) and his
multimedia theater piece “The Yellow Sound” (1909), spiritual
vibrations of color correspond to the timbres of orchestral
instruments: deep blue evokes the cellos, green is the timbre of
violins, and yellow conjures the sound of trumpets. Kandinsky
believed that synaesthesia manifested itself in highly developed,
spiritual individuals fine-tuned to the vibrations of the soul. In his
“Impression III (Concert),” Kandinsky captures Arnold Schoenberg’s
music that he heard in concert in 1911 (Example 2). Schoenberg
himself experimented with Kandinsky’s color-to-timbre
correspondences in his incomplete opera Die glückliche Hand
(1910–13).
For his synaesthetic symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire
(1909–10), Alexander Scriabin conceived of an electric color
keyboard (tastiera per luce) to illuminate his music. Inspired by
Helen Blavatsky’s synaesthetic theory in the theosophical treatise
The Secret Doctrine (1888) and by Rimington’s color-organ, Scriabin
elaborates on the occult relations between colors and sounds by
mapping out the color spectrum onto tonalities along the circle of
fifths, where C corresponds to red, D to sunny yellow, and F
(sharp) to violet-shaded deep blue (Fig. 3.). Yet, Prometheus only
anticipated Scriabin’s eschatological synaesthetic project The
Mysterium, which remained incomplete because of the composer’s
untimely death in 1915. This grandiose work was to be performed
in India and conflate all the arts: music, poetry, light, architecture,
dance, and fragrances so as to transfigure the world by unifying
the senses.
Inspired by mystical synaesthesia and Wagnerian aesthetics, the
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Italian Futurists sought to recreate the speed and dynamic totality
of everyday life, and stimulated also the lower senses in Futurist
cuisine and tactile theater. The artists Giacomo Balla and Carlo
Carrà captured the chaos of the modern city with its synaesthetic
“bubbling and whirling of forms and lights composed of sounds,
noises, and smells” (Carrà, “The Painting of Sound, Noise, and
Odors,” 1913). Luigi Russolo studied the vibrations of light and
sound in his spectrally colored paintings Music (1911) and The
Revolt (1911), and overturned classical harmony in his noise
composition, scored for intonarumori, or noisemakers.
Olivier Messiaen, another synaesthetic modernist, described the
piano music in the second part of his Quartet to the End of Time
(1941) as conjuring “gentle cascades of blue-orange chords.”
Composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp, the quartet
captures the artist’s synaesthesia augmented by the extreme
physical conditions of starvation, cold, and emotional distress. In
Couleurs de la cité celeste (1963), Messiaen specifically indicated the
colors that accompany the modes of limited transpositions
developed in his music theories: “red, touched with blue,” “orange,
gold, and milky white,” or “blue-violet and rose.”
Vladimir Nabokov, the most famous literary synaesthete,
endowed many of his characters with the gift of synaesthesia:
Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading, Fyodor in The Gift, and Van
in Ada or Ardor. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1947),
Nabokov reflects on the subtle interaction between colors,
sounds, and shapes of letters with the flair of a master stylist:
“oatmeal n, noodle-limp l … steely x, thundercloud z, and
huckleberry k… I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light
blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”
Nabokov associated his synaesthesia with both clairvoyance and
disjointed hallucinations, while its literary use evokes both
aesthetic pleasure and a sense of epiphany.
Since the 1990s, synaesthesia has once again drawn the interest
of scientists and critics after fMRI tests confirmed that crosssensory perception is not a figment of the imagination, but a
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genuine perceptual condition. Cytowic, Baron-Cohen and
Harrison, and Dann have labored on distinguishing between
idiopathic or genuine synaesthesia (Nabokov, Messiaen); pseudosynaesthesia in synaesthetic metaphors (Scriabin, Baudelaire,
Rimbaud); and drug-induced synaesthesia. Dimova has argued
that the multifarious discourses of synaesthesia promoted the
flourishing transpositions of modernist projects across the arts.
Currently active artists with synaesthesia include composer
Michael Torke, and painter, printmaker, and stage designer David
Hockney, famous for creating opera sets informed by his
synaesthesia of mingled colors, sounds, shapes, and space.
Further Reading
Baron-Cohen, S. and J.E. Harrison (1997) Synaesthesia: Classic and
Contemporary Readings, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Berghaus, G. (2012) “The Futurist Conception of Gesamtkunstwerk
and Marinetti’s Total Theater,” Italogramma, Vol. 4.
Cytowic, R.E. (1989) Synaesthesia: A Union of the Senses, SpringerVerlag.
Dann, K.T. (1998) Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the
Search for Transcendental Knowledge, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Dimova, P. (2013) Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, Farnham:
Ashgate.
Dimova, P. “The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in
European Modernism,” Manuscript.
Howes, D. (ed.) (2005) Empire of the Senses, Oxford: Berg.
Shaw-Miller, S. (2013) Eye hEar: The Visual in Music, Burlington, VT:
Ashgate.
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Simner, J. and E. Hubbard (eds.) (2014) The Oxford Handbook of
Synesthesia, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Syrotinski, M. and I. Maclachlan (eds.) (2001) Sensual Reading,
Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Van Campen, C. (2008) The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and
Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vinge, L. (1975) Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition, Lund:
Liber Läromedel.
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