Greg Jarvis was marking a student’s music-history paper when he encountered an unfamiliar word – synesthesia – linked to perceptual experiences that he had always considered a normal part of life. That was how he discovered, at age 34, that most people don’t see shapes when they hear music, as he has done for as long as he can remember.
“I just took it for granted,” says the Toronto musician, whose band the Flowers of Hell put out a new disc last week on the aptly named Optical Sounds label. “It was what listening to music was.” He assumed that everyone saw patterns of dots when they heard drums, fuzzy lines when someone played rock guitar and unattractive squiggles when having a conversation.
The first thing Jarvis did after reading up on synesthesia was to decide to make more music of his own and spend less time on other people’s (he worked for about a decade in the record industry). If he had a rare ability, he figured, why not explore and exploit it?
That’s one of the curious cultural facts about synesthesia: its tendency to spark people’s creativity, whether they have the condition or not. Synesthesia is a real object of clinical study, but for centuries it has also been a fertile idea for artists, scientists and philosophers looking for underlying patterns in experience and the world.
Long before synesthesia was recognized as a physiological condition, people tried to invent it. Sir Isaac Newton’s suggestion that the seven colours of light he saw through his prism were analogous to the seven notes of the diatonic scale triggered a 250-year debate on the links between music, light and the senses that perceive them. Colour organs, music-related paintings, cross-sensory poetic metaphors and son-et-lumière shows tried to prompt what Baudelaire called (in Les Fleurs du Mal) “métamorphose mystique/ De tous mes sens fondus en un!” Synesthesia was seen as an aesthetic ambition, not a condition of anyone’s daily life.
Several prominent artists who trafficked in this kind of synesthesia probably didn’t have the condition themselves; they include the poet Percy Shelley, the painter Wassily Kandinsky and the composers Alexander Skryabin and Bela Bartok. French composer Olivier Messiaen, one real synesthete, made his coloured hearing the basis for his whole art, developing a system of modes and “colour chords” that corresponded to his visual experience of sound.
Jarvis’s kind of visible music is uncommon even among synesthetes, many more of whom, like Messiaen, see sound as colour. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov saw colours when he read text or individual letters. Other synesthetes’ visual or aural experience is linked to sensations of taste. It used to be thought that real synesthesia was very rare, though recent research suggests that as many as one in 23 people may have it to some degree.
Interest in synesthesia declined as Romantic dreams of sensory fusion faded, and as science became more skeptical of subjective experience. But in recent decades synesthesia has become a hot research topic, as neuroscientists find proof that even an apparently basic perception may trigger a complex subjective process in the brain.
Advanced brain imaging has shown significant “crosstalk” across sectors formerly thought to have little contact. From this point of view, synesthetes are people whose crosstalk is so loud, it breaks into their conscious awareness. One current hypothesis holds that we may all have been synesthetes in the cradle, and that most of us lose this “joined perception” (the word’s literal meaning) as our brains become adept at separating taste sensations from those of colour and sound. It’s the Romantics’ sensory fusion in reverse.
