MOTIVATION
One of the goals of this exposition is to acknowledge the intrinsic connection between colour and sound and its consequence for the audience and performers. Moreover, this thesis is about the search for perceptually meaningful correspondences between colour and sound. Finally, it educates the reader about synaesthesia, offering a different perspective from which Messiaen’s Theme and Variations (which will be examined as an elaborate case study) can or might be experienced differently for a performer and for a listener. It encourages synaesthete and non-synaesthete performers and listeners to enhance their auditory experience through this aesthetic journey by acknowledging the possibility for two or more senses to converge.
Research Process
Apart from the bibliographic part of this research there is an experimental component. I designed a series of concerts (public performances) with my string quartet inspired by the content of this thesis. The process of designing these concerts was realised based on the articles on Crossmodal Correspondences. In these concerts we asked the audience to associate contrasting pieces with diffferent colours. You can find more details on this page.
Even though, for my personal taste, the association of colour with sound is in itself very aesthetically pleasing, I had to figure out the driving force behind this assumption that the two are connected. The reasons that have convinced me so far are theoretical and aesthetic as well as empirical and practical. First and foremost, this fascinating search originates from the intrinsic need to make sense out of music .
Regarding the idea of musical meaning: When we are trying to describe music in terms of our own immediate subjective impressions we often reach for corssmodal metaphors. We call the music glassy or smooth, dark or thick or heavy, large or small. All these things are crossmodal metaphors! One would think that these metaphors must be entirely subjective or at least culturally established... but actually they have a scientific background!
There has been a long history of associating music with linguistics. Speech, being the most primal/primitive characteristic of human communication is of course the most common medium we use to refer to music. However, grammar has many nuances, hence its incapability for capturing music fully. And since words usually fail to describe its magnitude, it is worth trying something else...colours!
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) reflects a lot on language and how restraining it can be when it comes to describing music, especially when discussing the impossibility of a priori sentences. Essentially, if the subject lacks the ability to experience and express itself, asserting the existence of a priori truths becomes nonsensical. In his words, "Everything we see could also be otherwise. Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise". ♪ The notion of meaning appears to be applicable only within the context of a language's existence. Grammar, in this sense, constructs a framework for meaning, serving as a terrain for the imaginative possibilities of cultural development, where a single word may convey significantly different nuances within diverse grammatical structures.♪
As far as the empirical and practical reasons are concerned, I am hoping that this experience will resonate with most -if not all- readers that have studied and performed music. I am not sure with regard to when this occurred to me for the first time but there were numerous lessons when I was advised –by different teachers- to associate colour with some aspect of my performance. I am a violin player so this discussion primarily revolved around vibrato (e.g. explore a darker coloured vibrato), and sound production (e.g. your sound can be brighter here).
We shall start the investigation by digging into a historical approach to the matter. There has been a long history of fascinating speculations concerning the relationship between colour and sound throughout the centuries. Intuition that there was a meaningful relationship between the musical scale and the hues of colours of the rainbow can be traced all the way back to Greek ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and, Pythagoras.