What colour is your music?

Are you one of those few people who see music in colors?

When I was a kid, I started piano at four and sang in choirs from eight. I loved singing and playing. There is a huge thrill to be part of a team, a choir, to be part of the vibration of sound, create perfect harmony and to perform. In the choir I always knew when we went sharp or flat. It was just an instinct. I thought everyone knew it. It is hard to describe. I felt or saw music in my head and if it went sharp I felt like the picture went lighter in colur and if we went flat it changed its shade to grey or dark. The more I sang and played, the more I could recognize each note of the piano and started to see colors. Any song I learnt, I was able to recall any time and always starting it on the right pitch. I remember rare incidents when during the concert something went wrong in the choir and we fell apart in a challenging piece. I just waited for the suitable place where the music had some structural cut or a new entry. I made sure that I came in first on the right pitch, leading the choir back where we all felt familiar, saving the performance. If all went well, nobody in the audience noticed it but everyone knew it in the choir and excitedly talked about it as we left the stage. It was a huge risk to take but there was no other solution. It was just a natural instinct. It was not planned, it just happened. Funnily, our conductor knew that someone will save the performance. He just did not know when and how! The same happened to me a few times as a conductor. It is a less ideal situation because when singing comes from the conductor, it is more noticeable, especially if not a choir but an orchestra is falling apart!!! These are behind the scene secrets but everyone remembers them for the rest of their lives. I believe, in medical or scientific terms, I have no absolute pitch nor synaesthesia. I just had good skills and I am a result of a long term, fantastic training and decades of disciplined work.

Seeing Music

What colour and shape is your favourite song? For some people with synaesthesia, it's a pretty straightforward question. Due to connections between different perceptual areas of their brain - like the part of the brain that perceives colour being linked with the area that detects a tone - synaesthetes tend to have two or more of their senses that are connected. With one type of synaesthesia, those affected will see colours and shapes when they listen to music, and may associate a specific colour with each letter and day of the week. Synesthesia runs strongly in families, but the precise mode of inheritance has yet to be ascertained. As many as 1 percent of people have the most recognizable form of synesthesia, studies say. Acclaimed Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote "Lolita," famously had the disorder, as did physicist Richard Feynman and Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt.

Is D Yellow for you?

"You can't get a more yellow key than D, he (Aaaron McMillan) told me as he played the familiar notes of Rachmaninov's Prelude in D. Most ears could not 'hear' any yellow, but for Aaron, every piece of music conjured a distinct band of the color spectrum."

"Aaron McMillan pianist was certain that he did not have the neurological condition synesthesia, which blurs the senses, causing people to taste names or smell colors or see sounds; he simply associated each musical key and its mood with a color. C major was pure white and the other keys fanned out in a rainbow from red A up to violet G. If he were asked to compose while sitting in a green field, for example he knew he would have to write in grassy E flat or the more stridently green E. This was his personal interpretation but he was satisfied to learn that the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin had also linked each key with a color. Aaron was uncomprehending when another composer told him he pictured G as the green key. G could only be violet. "Life In His Hands The true story of a Neurosurgeon and a Pianist by Susan Wyndham