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I've often wondered if people with Chromesthesia (who associate sounds with colours and/or colours with sounds) fall into sets of people with similar colour/sou

I've often wondered if people with Chromesthesia (who associate sounds with colours and/or colours with sounds) fall into sets of people with similar colour/sound mappings. "..studies to date have reported that synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike associate high pitched sounds with lighter or brighter colors and low pitched sounds with darker colors, indicating that a common mechanism may underlie those associations in normal adult brains" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromesthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromesthesia

dfan 5y ago
I associate some pitch classes with colors and I think it's because of a toy glockenspiel I had when I was a kid.
- rolha-capoeira 5y ago
  Interesting. I do think some of my forms of synesthesia are from colors in my childhood, but not my sound-color experience.
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quinnjh 5y ago
From what ive gathered (doing interactive light/sound stuff and chatting with folks at CymaSpace) the issue is that its subjective. Synaesthetes are often frustrated with color to pitch mapping that claims it is "inherent" because the root color (this author picked blue because "it seemed settled") is the creators personal synaesthetic correlation. The issue gets complex when you consider what training set makes each synaesthete build the correlations between colors, moods, sounds, etc. The article its-self is rad in that the circle of fifths is very much a "relative" thing to begin with so we are actually seeing some pretty "flavorful" results- but the search for the "true color of sound" is tough when light is 430-730 trillion hz and audio is 20-20 thousand hz. The factor that you then are dividing or transposing by is arbitrary.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  > the circle of fifths is very much a "relative" thing to begin with I'm not sure what you mean.. Is this a pun? The circle of fifths is right on the intersection of music and physics; each perfect fifth is (very close to) a 3:2 ratio on the previous frequency, which is probably why pentatonic scales are found across cultures. I don't know how much less "relative" you can get with something so subjective as music.
rolha-capoeira 5y ago
I think that is largely true for my personal experience, however, the timbre of the sound also affects the color for me.

dfan 5y ago

I associate some pitch classes with colors and I think it's because of a toy glockenspiel I had when I was a kid.

rolha-capoeira 5y ago
Interesting. I do think some of my forms of synesthesia are from colors in my childhood, but not my sound-color experience.

deleted 5y ago

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quinnjh 5y ago

From what ive gathered (doing interactive light/sound stuff and chatting with folks at CymaSpace) the issue is that its subjective. Synaesthetes are often frustrated with color to pitch mapping that claims it is "inherent" because the root color (this author picked blue because "it seemed settled") is the creators personal synaesthetic correlation. The issue gets complex when you consider what training set makes each synaesthete build the correlations between colors, moods, sounds, etc. The article its-self is rad in that the circle of fifths is very much a "relative" thing to begin with so we are actually seeing some pretty "flavorful" results- but the search for the "true color of sound" is tough when light is 430-730 trillion hz and audio is 20-20 thousand hz. The factor that you then are dividing or transposing by is arbitrary.

mandmandam 5y ago
> the circle of fifths is very much a "relative" thing to begin with I'm not sure what you mean.. Is this a pun? The circle of fifths is right on the intersection of music and physics; each perfect fifth is (very close to) a 3:2 ratio on the previous frequency, which is probably why pentatonic scales are found across cultures. I don't know how much less "relative" you can get with something so subjective as music.

rolha-capoeira 5y ago

I think that is largely true for my personal experience, however, the timbre of the sound also affects the color for me.