Synaesthesia for Reading and Playing Musical Notes

This study reports three cases of synaesthesia who experience colors in response to written musical notation, graphemes and heard music. The synaesthetes show Stroop-like interference when asked to name the colour of graphemes but not for written musical notes. However, reliable interference is found in two further studies that require deeper processing of the musical notation (namely playing music from colored notation, and naming the synaesthetic color of the notes whilst suppressing the veridical color). This is the first empirical demonstration of synaesthesia for musical notation. The fact that synaesthetic color influences music playing/reading (a sensory-motor transformation) but not verbal color naming suggests that synaesthetic Stroop effects can arise from processing the meaning of a stimulus and not just as a result of verbal response interference. However, it is likely that the color associations themselves have a developmental origin in the names assigned to them. In all three cases, the colors of the written notes are related to the graphemes that arbitrarily denote them (e.g., ‘A’ may be “red” both as a letter and when written in musical notation). The results suggest that synaesthetic associations may migrate from one representational format (e.g., graphemes) to another (e.g., musical notation).

Notes

¹ This is not to be confused with the nature of the synaesthetic experience itself that is necessarily perceptual (according to the definition offered here). It is an open question as to whether synaesthesia is induced by perceptual properties of the stimulus (e.g., the font) the conceptual properties (e.g., the inferred meaning) or both (e.g. Dixon et al., in press; Grossenbacher and Lovelace, 2001).

² When given 11 piano notes from 1 octave either side of middle C in a random order, neither LHM nor MM were able to guess the identity of the note any more than would be expected by chance (18% and 27% respectively). RT was unavailable for testing on this occasion. She is certain that she is unable to identify isolated notes.

³ RT was not tested with auditory notes (she lost contact with the researchers), but our main claims concern the similarities between graphemes and written musical notes (that we were able to verify on several occasions).

⁴ It is possible that effects of hands, clefs or interactions between them are found but we lack the statistical power to detect them.

⁵ Taken from a German translation (page 101, Schlegel, 1824) of the original manuscript published in Latin.

Sachs GTL. Historiae naturalis duorum leucaetiopum: Auctoris ipsius et sororis ei us. Solisbaci: Sumptibus Bibliopolii Seideliani. 1812