Musicians:Key-colour synaesthesia and learning to read music

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I have a form of purely mental synaesthesia where I have very strong, and consistent links between the idea of different sensory experiences. (For example, the number 7 always seems golden yellow, but I don't actually see it as yellow.) One of my synaesthetic links is between colour and musical key. I don't feel like listing all my key-colour associations right now, so I'll simplify it by saying that flat keys start off as blue-ish and shade toward purple, getting darker as more flats are added, and sharp keys tend to be yellowish, greenish, brownish or a mixture of those, and their colour mix becomes more complex as more sharps are added. C major is royal blue, and a minor is a dark honey colour. Minor keys tend to be a darker version of their tonic major.

Something that I never realised about this until very recently, is that when I see a key signature at the start of a piece, it affects my perception of the notes that are changed by it. I didn't know quite what I was "seeing" differently until the day before yesterday, when one of my piano students was playing a piece in g minor, and I realised that I was "seeing" all the B flats and E flats as having a blue tint. It only sunk in then that those notes were not actually blue, and that to most people they'd seem no different from the notes surrounding them (apart from being positioned differently on the stave, but yeah).

Here is a picture to illustrate (if anyone's curious, it's a sonata for clarinet and piano that I wrote a while ago. It apes the early Classical style). I don't actually see the blue overlay on those notes, but they come into my head as blue.



I'm certain that this association has helped me greatly in learning to read music.

Does anyone else perceive music in similar ways? How did it affect your musical development?

What about enharmonic equivalence? If a piece of music is written twice, once in C# major and once in D flat major and then played twice, once from each written key on the same equally-tempered piano, what happens? Do they sound the same because the notes are the same within the equally-tempered scale or do they sound different on account of the effect which the written notation has upon the player?

With writing, they look different. When heard, they sound different because of context: usually sharp keys are approached from other sharp keys, and flat keys are approached from other flat keys.

I read about a bar a minute. Let me know if I have this straight;

The piece is a lot of octaves, the bar on top is for the clarinet? I think it's in E, but I haven't read real music since the mid-70s...could have forgotten a lot by then...

An awful lot of the guitar stuff I write is in Drop D tuning, largely because of my associations with the D minor and pentatonic scales actually. When I'm playing a piece which is particularly droney and slow, it evokes an image of very slow but flowing reds and yellows, but a faster, heavier song brings on more of an orange and red 'rock face' as far as mental images are concerned. I don't think it's anything to do with synaesthesia, but it's certainly interesting to associate a sound with a distinct mental image (as far as I'm concerned).

I don't really have any internal sense for different keys.

And the keys and individual notes don't do anything for me, musically or with any other senses. But I do sense musical pattern, in the same way I sense math and number patterns and relationships.

I found conventional music notation to be a detriment to me noticing these patterns. I internalize musical patterns that I like, outside of any notation. Attempting to describe them or put them in notation is difficult for me. It's like translating between two languages, and I am horribly slow at encoding/decoding. Even the naming conventions of music tends to distract me from music. I think up a melody and it's a matter of 'hunting and pecking' to find the note that fits in my head. When I really get into playing an instrument, There is a more direct connection between my brain and the music on the instrument... but there is still some translation problems. And I find nearly all instrument introduce a mechanical bias towards playing certain notes and in a certain way, which can limit what comes out.

I like piano roll notation better, because all the patterns are there to see plainly... and I can manipulate the patterns without having to do the translating like in conventional notation. It always me to work with music in a 'mathematical' way. Which to me is my strongest sense, the sense of pattern and the relationships between musical elements. I sense this stuff in my head, I kind of sense it in piano roll notation... I don't sense anything when I read conventional notation. Just too much information to process at once...

Standard musical notation is better for rhythm. I can read rhythm patterns and internalize what it will sound like much better than with notes. But it too breaks down when I'm trying to convey a polyrhythm and what notes fall between each other and for what duration...

Any other musicians approach music from a more mathematical frame of mind? I've tried to find a mathematical pattern that will help me make interesting chord progressions or melodies. It helps sometimes, but I still need to break the rules to make it sound 'perfect'.

It seems most Aspies understand music in a very sensory frame of mind.

i tend to see music more all a colours "thing" but also as a emotional idea.

example: hendrix would sit it the studio and when listening over what he recorded he would say something like "that needs more blue" or that needs more "red"

i tend to see certain scales have a impact emotionly on me

i.e lydian: flying, dorian: walking

it kinda goes on from their.

there is a chapter in a book called 'musicophilia' by oliver sacks that outlines various examples and case studies of musical synesthesia, many of which are very similar to what you described. it's a really good book in general also, and you would probably understand it much better than I do because it seems you have a good grasp on the technical aspects of music (I have played guitar for most of my life but I never got involved with the scales/theory/more technical side of it all; I really am unable to explain the approach I take to interpret and construct music)

I am equally terrible at explaining books, but suffice it to say if you are interested in the interplay between music and the function/dysfunction/chemistry of the brain it is worth checking out

I'm actually kinda surprised this book hasn't come up in this discussion yet

Yeah thanks for recommending that book, looks interesting. I'm getting it from the Library.