Color Hearing
Article date: 18/11/08 | Last edited: 6/12/08
This post is to follow up on a comment I made on youngmusician.com.au. I also hope that it will add more fuel to the discussion started by Brendan. Many years ago I copied the following in my notebook:
Synesthesia is the subjective image of a sense other than the one being stimulated. In “color hearing”, the most common instance of synesthesia, sound (musical pitches especially) - trigger characteristic colours. For Scriabin, (as I have mentioned in my comment here ) this photism was natural reality, as it was for Rimski-Korsakov. Both men deplored Wagner’s “Magic Fire Music”: “He uses the wrong tonality”, - Scriabin said and repeats the music in different keys. Both composers agreed that the key should be G, the color of rosy-orange or red-violet.
Scriabin’s color scale was arbitrary and personal, beginning with Red to represent the pitch C. As murkily imprecise as these color-pitch parallels may have been, we have access to as definitive a formulation as one might hope for: Bulat Galeev’s chart labeled “Scriabin’s Musico - Chromo - Logo Schema”. Galeev, who founded the “Prometheus” Institute in Kazan, computerised everything Scriabin ever said about the relation of music meaning and color, and reduced the synthesis to a circle of fifths:
F = Diversity of Will, Deep Red
B flat = Lust or Passion, Rose or Steel
E flat = Humanity, Flesh (glint of Steel)
A flat = Movement of Spirit into Matter, Violet or Lilac
D flat/C sharp = Will of the Creative Spirit, Violet or Purple
F sharp = Creativity, Bright Blue or Violet
C flat/B = Contemplation, Blue or Pearly Blue
E = Dream, sky Blue (Moonshine or Frost)
A = Matter, Green
D = Joy, Yellow
G = Creative play, Orange
C = will of Human, Red (intense)
Unfortunately I can not reference this properly, nor can I be absolutely sure if this is an accurate copy. I found it! It is by F. Bowers (A.Scriabin. “Poem of Ecstasy” and “Prometheus: Poem of Fire”, in full score. New York: Dover Publ., Inc., 1995, p.114). All I can vividly recall is reading the above mentioned exchange between Skryabin and Rimski-Korsakov a long time ago from a Russian manuscript. So, a couple of new interesting web sites: Lux Aeterna and Bulat Galeev’s “Prometheus” Institute.
Book by Wayne Slawson’s “Sound Color” - W. Slawson is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published in the fields of psychoacoustics and music theory.
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