My reverse synaesthesia

and of course cerulean blue is middle C!

by Patricia Aidley
A sound-colour synaesthete is a person who, in their minds eye, sees a particular colour on hearing a specific musical note. I am the reverse. When seeing colours I hear zings in my head, not specific notes as I am tone deaf. My cerulean lue middle ! is therefore an appro"imation i.e. plus or minus a tone or two# $ot conscious of this situation until my early thirties, a time of considera le psychological stress, my seeing an office staircase wall painted gloss cerulean lue was the catalyst. %he zing in my rain was deafening# A revelation. I remem er it well. My mind does not sing when it zings& it 'ust zings, which is a clear somehow right sharp long sound. Whether zings vary for colours I dont (now, ut it cant e y very much as even I would detect it. )erhaps different people zing differently. *ome colours such as deep pin(s +li(e fuchsia, and strong cerulean and royal lues are innately intense and cause intense zinging for me. -riefly, it seems that as the two large cere ral hemispheres of the rain develop in humans, with the main centre for musical hearing eing in the right one and that for seeing eing in the left, nerve cell connections e"ist etween them and everyone initially, as em ryo and foetus, is a sound-colour and colour-sound synaesthete. %hese nerve cell connections, which are lines of communications for nerve impulses, rea( down in the first three or four years of a childs life and the senses of hearing and seeing ecome physically and functionally separate. .owever in sound-colour and colour-sound synaesthetes some cere ral hemisphere connections presuma ly persist throughout life +I wonder why, and, therefore, sound and colour perceptions are intertwined. Why my apparently rare synaesthesia should e the reverse of the usual sound initiates colour (ind/ with my musical appreciation so poor and my colour appreciation so developed/ seems as odd as it is une"plained. Music lessons, when an adolescent, were something of a disaster and a rare educational hiccup. *ome classical music is tolera le/ 'ust. Modern music is ugly, hurts my ears, is unsettling +I have to escape, and, of course, largely unintelligi le/ a tsunami of sound, of overwhelming thump and screech, which ma(es me feel physically sic(. All this in spite of coming from a musical family on my fathers side. 0uring WWII I could hear the whine of 12 roc(ets approaching 3ondon long efore anyone else and minutes efore the sirens sounded. 4uite useful at times. !olour is central in my life and gives me great pleasure. I can detect the slightest differences in colours. I thin( and, most nights, dream in colour +usually coloured allegories of the days events, and see num ers stepped against a lue and yellow ac(ground. I design and imagine in swathes and loc(s of colour. 5ntil recently +on discovering my reverse synaesthesia, I thought little of the overall role of colour in my life/ too( it for granted. 6ven my first pu lished +'oint, paper7 was on chromosomes +coloured odies, of the a normal human (ind# An admirer of the li(es of Mar( 8oth(o I too have wondered whether modern +and prehistoric, a stract painters were synaesthetes painting for other synaesthetes, consciously or not. My a stract paintings are 'ust for me. A final thought as a retired zoologist& one pigment of my imagination is that vermilion is a mass of red worms# *Cowie,V., A.Coppen and P.Norman (1960). Nuclear se and !od"#!uild in sc$i%op$renia. &ri'is$ (edical )ournal Au*us' 6, 1960.
UK Synaesthesia Association Newsletter Supplement Spring 2007 Pat Aidley 14 04 07

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