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Notes as colours

5K views 46 replies 28 participants last post by  milandro 
#1 Ā·
Does anyone else visualize the notes as a colour ?

Not so much the notes when reading a piece of music, but rather when I'm thinking about an individual note, or key.
It's not something I've ever paid much attention to, but I do think of the main notes (flats or sharps don't seem to change anything) as having a specific coulour.

I always perceive :
C as Blue
D as Yellow
E as Blue
F as Brown
G as Green
A as Red
B as Orange

Just thought I'd throw it out there ... :mrgreen:

Also not sure why I think of C and E both as blue, that's just the way it is. :bluewink:
 
#37 Ā·
I have a few friends with synesthesia. One in particular sees sounds as colors... even chords are a color array to him, and chords/melodies are a series of color patterns. He knows thousands of songs and works full time as a singer/piano man in a piano bar... between his memory for sound and his memory for the colors, he has near total recall with music and play almost anything at the drop of a hat, even really obscure stuff. The guy has really worked at turning this phenomenon to his advantage!
 
#41 Ā· (Edited)
well, we do refer to saxophone as: warm, bright, centered, projected, hollow, round, ....

all of this can be an allusion, a metaphor or be a literal ā€œ visionā€ .

In postulating ideasthesia the theorists suppose that these things are way more common than we think.
 
#46 Ā·
I usually close my eyes when improvising, to block visual distractions from the real world. Mentally I visualize the ensemble music as a kind of architectural landscape to travel through or climb up. So, not colors, but virtual 3-D.
 
#47 Ā·
synesthesia is really a bunch of different phenomena amassed under one word and even then there is no univocity , so what's red for one would be blue for someone else.

The phenomenon really indicates an overlapping of senses so something that is essentially auditive ( for example it may be even thoughts or anything involving perception) becomes " visible" but it may as wel give you the sense of " salty" or " acid" in the mouth (for instance) or an itch somewhere.., the neural paths leading to senses seem to cross and to produce a short circuit of some sort in an area different than the one the usual path leads.

For all we know (and neuro psychiatry is a science in continuous progress) there may very well be a number of people whom associate music to 3D shapes.

 
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