Chromesthesia

Chromesthesia or sound-to-color synesthesia is a type of synesthesia in which sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color.[1] With sounds inducing color concurrently, chromesthesia is sound-color synesthesia. Individuals with sound-color synesthesia are consciously aware of their synesthetic color associations/perceptions in daily life.[2] Synesthetes that perceive color while listening to music, experience the colors in addition to the normal auditory sensations. The synesthetic color experience supplements, but does not obscure real, modality-specific perceptions.[2] As with other forms of synesthesia, individuals with sound-color synesthesia perceive it spontaneously, without effort, and as their normal realm of experience.[2]

A keyboard depicting note-color associations. Note that the colors are experienced with the sounding of the note, and are not necessarily localized to piano keys.

Individual variance

The color associations, that is, which color is associated to which sound, tone, pitch, or timbre is highly idiosyncratic, but in most cases, consistent over time.[1][3] Individuals with synesthesia have unique color pairings. However, 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 underly those associations in normal adult brains.[4] There are forms of pseudo-chromesthesia that may be explained by associations synesthetes have made and forgotten from childhood.[5]

As with other types of synesthesia, sound-color synesthesia can be divided into groups based on the way the colors are experienced. Those that 'see' or perceive the color in external space are called projectors, and those that perceive the color in the mind's eye are often called associators, but these terms can be misleading to understanding the nature of the experience.[1][2] For most synesthetes, the condition is not wholly sensory/perceptual.[2]

For some individuals, chromesthesia is only triggered by speech sounds, while others' chromesthesia can be triggered by any auditory stimuli.[6] In a study investigating variability within categories of synesthesia, 40% of subjects with chromesthesia for spoken words reported that voice pitch, accent, and prosody influenced the synesthetic color, whereas few subjects reported that volume or speed of talking had any influence.[7] Within these subjects, many reported that the speaker's emotional inflection could influence the synesthetic color, but only two reported that their own mood had such influence.[7] Of participants categorized as having synesthesia for music in this study, 75% reported concurrents exclusively when listening to notes being played.[7] When asked whether the experience of the concurrent could be voluntarily controlled, only 33% of participants indicated an ability to smother, ignore, or willfully evoke their concurrents without great effort.[7] Attention to the inducing stimulus was reported as influential in 59% of participants.[7] Other contributing factors included concentration level, fatigue, sleep habits, fever, emotions, and substances, such as caffeine or alcohol.[7]

Sound-color synesthesia is far more common than color-sound synesthesia, although there are reported cases where sounds and colors activate bidirectionally. One individual, JR, sees colors when she hears sounds and also hears sounds when she sees colors.[6] This type of synesthesia interferes greatly with daily life. This individual's associations were highly consistent over time, but the associations were not necessarily the same in either direction.[6]

There may be an effect of semantic mediation in some individuals with sound-color synesthesia. One subject, MH, self-triggered notes on a synthesizer and noted the color associations. When the synthesizer was transposed without her knowledge, she reported identical color associations to the notes that she believed she was hearing, rather than the absolute pitch of the tones.[3]

Research

The mechanism by which synesthesia occurs has yet to be identified. Given that synesthetes and non-synesthetes both match sounds to colors in a non-arbitrary way, and that the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs can induce synesthesia in under an hour, some researchers suggest that synesthetic experience uses existing pathways in the normal brain.[4] The cause of synesthesia is also unclear, although evidence points to a genetic predisposition. Synesthesia runs in families, though the condition may present idiosyncratically within a family.[8] Synesthesia may skip a generation.[8] However, there are cases of monozygotic twins where only one has synesthesia, indicating there may be additional factors.[8]

Differences between synesthetic and non-synesthetic brains may reflect direct hard-wired connections between unimodal auditory and visual regions in the brain, or they may reflect feedback pathways from multimodal audiovisual regions to unimodal visual regions present in all brains.[4]

During an art class an experiment was conducted in which the participants were asked to create paintings while listening to songs from different genres every 20 minutes. The use of the colour mustard yellow was observed in most of the paintings. There was no hypothesis offered for the specific use of that colour. Some participants chose the same colours and the paintings were observed to be more abstract or messy. Music which was more loud or "rock" induced the participants to paint with more abrupt or rigid strokes. When a more traditional/cultural song was played most people painted what they associated with that culture, e.g. colours symbolising patriotism for the country or sites/scenery in the country.

Cross-activation theory

The cross-activation theory of synesthesia was formulated by V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubard, based on converging evidence from studies of synesthesia that sensory areas for processing real and synesthetic information tend to be neighboring brain regions.[8] This is most apparent in grapheme-color synesthesia, because the brain regions for color processing and visual word form processing are adjacent.[9] Individuals with sound-color synesthesia show activation of brain areas involved in visual processing, such as V4, immediately after the auditory perception, indicating an automatic linking of sounds and colors.[8] The reason for this cross-activation is unclear, but one hypothesis is that the increased connectivity between adjacent brain regions is due to a reduction in the pruning of neuronal networks during childhood.[8]

Disinhibited feedback model

The disinhibited feedback model is an alternative to the cross-activation theory.[8] The disinhibited feedback model rejects the assumption of increased connectivity in synesthetes and proposes that the cross-activation is due to a decrease of inhibition in the networks present in the normal adult brain.[8] Disinhibited feedback could account for the fact that sound-color synesthesia can be acquired by damage to the retino-cortical pathway.[4]

Forward feeding connections in the brain that receive converging signals from multiple pathways are reciprocated by feedback connections.[10] In most people, feedback connections are sufficiently inhibited to avoid synesthetic induction of a concurrent perception. In synesthetes, it is suggested that feedforward signaling in the inducer pathway could activate neurons to which both inducer and concurrent pathways converge, and that feedback signaling is capable of propagating down the concurrent pathway to activate the concurrent representation.[10] In this mechanism, feedforward activity from the inducer leads to feedback activation of the concurrent representation.[10]

Involvement of specific brain regions

In addition to high interconnectivity in synesthesia, there is an apparent contribution from the inferior parietal cortex during synesthetic experiences, possibly serving as the mechanism to bind the real and synesthetic perceptions into one experience.[8][11] Parietal lobe activation is most apparent when the synesthete is directing attentional focus to the synesthetic experience.[8]

Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies implicate the left superior temporal sulcus for the integration of auditory and visual information. This brain region responds most strongly to congruent pairs of visual and auditory information, such as congruent lip movements and speech.[4]

Definitional bias

The literature contains conflicting definitional criteria for synesthesia, which could bias selection of research subjects and interpretation of results. Synesthesia has long been described as a 'merging of the senses' or as a kind of 'cross-sensory' experience; however, the condition is not purely sensory/perceptual in all individuals. While this description of synesthesia is useful in describing the condition, it should not be interpreted literally and used as selection criteria for scientific exploration.[2]

Another common defining characteristic of synesthesia is that synesthetic associations are consistent over time. This is generally determined by having individuals report color pairings twice, with several months separating the test from the re-test. Consistency has been described as so fundamental to synesthesia that the test of consistency has become the behavioral 'gold standard' for identifying the genuine condition, and selecting subjects for research.[2] This creates a circular bias, in which virtually all research subjects show consistency over time because they have been selected for it.[2] While consistency, to some extent, may be characteristic of synesthesia, there are individuals that fit all other criteria of synesthesia, but report that their synesthetic associations are not consistent over time.[2]

Another misleading defining characteristic of synesthesia has been that synesthetic concurrents are spatially extended, and the individuals should be able to indicate a spatial location in which the concurrent is experienced. In the case of sound-color synesthesia, those who experience colored photisms from listening to music can often describe the direction of movement of these photisms.[2] While the majority of synesthetes experience a spatial quality to the synesthetic experience, there are still many that report no such quality.[2]

In addition to definitional inclusion/exclusion criteria for synesthesia research, self-report bias is also likely relevant to many studies. This self-report bias, if it exists, would perpetuate itself because the condition would become defined by those cases that become known, and not by those that remain hidden.[2] This is significant because many synesthetic individuals may exclude themselves on the basis of not fitting the prescribed definitional criteria. This is also significant to the extent that synesthetic individuals have a limited ability to differentiate their experience from that of nonsynesthetic individuals.

A possible resolution of these issues would involve defining synesthesia on a neurological basis.[2] Such a unifying neurobiological cause has yet to be found, but if it exists, it would deepen understanding of the phenomenon in ways that the behavioral definition has failed to do.[2]

Associated cognitive traits

The proportion of synesthetes among artists is around twice as high as it is in the general population. Synesthetic artists tend to excel in arts in which they benefit the most from their form of synesthesia. Individuals with sound-color synesthesia are thus more inclined to play a musical instrument. Additionally these artists use their ability to compose music that expresses the colors they are envisioning. The colors vary between the artists but some artists often associate similar colors with the same key signature.

However, musical experience does not assist the ability to consistently match colors to tones. Against natural expectation, studies have found that possession of absolute pitch increased local variance in matching ability.[3] One possible explanation for this is that because absolute pitch is subject to chance error, occasionally incorrectly inferred note names could compete with the pitch-induced color on particular trials.[3] Another possibility is that people with absolute pitch can label tighter pitch recognition categories than normal, introducing a greater number of category boundaries to cross between distinct tones.[3]

Composers with Chromesthesia:

This form of Synesthesia is thoroughly discussed but is harder to clarify for individuals who do not comprehend it. For the curious Individual, one can research and discover music by composers who have Synesthesia. There are famous composers who composed or even continue to compose music with this ability as an influence. Composers range from Olivier Messiaen, Scriabin, Sibelius and many more.

Franz Liszt is a composer who was known for asking performers to play with color. He was noted telling his orchestra to play the music in a “Bluer Fashion,” [12] since that is what the tone required. Synesthesia was not a common term in Lizst's time; people thought he was playing a trick on them when he referred to a color instead of a musical term.

Musical composer, Leonard Bernstein, openly discussed his Chromesthesia which he described as a “timbre to color.” [12] Although he does not reference specific songs as being a certain color, he does explain the way it should sound to the artist performing. There are recordings of him stopping orchestras and singers when they are changing the "timbre."[13] If someone changes the “timbre” or tone in a piece it does not necessarily change the sound to the listener but the composer with Chromesthesia will automatically know.

Amy Beach was another composer who had Synesthesia. According to her perspective, each key signature was associated with a particular color. If an artist changed the key to suit their voice, then she would become upset because it would change the intended sound, portrayal, and emotion of the piece.[12]

References
  1. Cytowic, Richard E; Eagleman, David M (2009). Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (with an afterword by Dmitri Nabokov). Cambridge: MIT Press. pp. 309. ISBN 0-262-01279-0
  2. Simner, J. (2012a). Defining synaesthesia. British Journal of Psychology, 103, 1-15. doi: 10.1348/000712610x528305
  3. Head, P. D. (2006). Synaesthesia: Pitch-color isomorphism in RGB-space? Cortex, 42(2), 164-174.
  4. Ward, J (2006). Sound-color Synaesthesia: to what extent does it use cross-modal mechanisms common to us all? Cortex, 42, 264-280.
  5. Calkins, Mary Whiton (1893-07-01). "A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia and of Mental-Forms". The American Journal of Psychology. 5 (4): 439–464. doi:10.2307/1411912. JSTOR 1411912.
  6. Goller, A., Otten, L., Ward, J. (2008). Seeing Sounds and Hearing colors: An Event-related Potential Study of Auditory-Visual Synesthesia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21:10, 1869-1881.
  7. Van Leeuwen, T. (2012). Modality and Variability of Synesthetic Experience. American Journal of Psychology, 125(1), 81-94.
  8. Specht, K. (2012). SYNAESTHESIA: CROSS ACTIVATIONS, HIGH INTERCONNECTIVITY, AND A PARIETAL HUB. Translational Neuroscience, 3(1), 15-21. doi: 10.2478/s13380-012-0007-z
  9. Brang, D., Williams, L. E., & Ramachandran, V. S. (2012). Grapheme-color synesthetes show enhanced crossmodal processing between auditory and visual modalities. Cortex, 48(5), 630-637. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2011.06.008
  10. Grossenbacher, P. G., Lovelace, C. T. (2001). Mechanisms of synesthesia: cognitive and physiological constraints. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(1), 36-41.
  11. Dovern, A., Fink, G. R., Fromme, A. C. B., Wohlschlager, A. M., Weiss, P. H., & Riedl, V. (2012). Intrinsic Network Connectivity Reflects Consistency of Synesthetic Experiences. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(22), 7614-7621. doi: 10.1523/jneurosci.5401-11.2012
  12. "Synesthete-composers-and-musicians". www.daysyn.com. Retrieved 2019-10-15.
  13. "Tenor Keeps Screwing Up while Bernstein Conducts - Awkward Sequence" – via www.youtube.com.
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