Hearing Color – Seeing Sound

Recently, I’ve seen two distinct references to people who can “see” sounds or “hear” colors.  The first was in a novel, and the second in a TV news feature. 

Both treated the ability as a disability – the product of scrambled wiring in the brain due to an illness or injury – but I’m not so sure.  Maybe it is an enhancement, rather than a loss.

Scientists tell us that both sound and color (light) are simply vibration, two sets of waveforms.  Although the frequencies of the electromagnetic waves that we see are much higher and the wavelengths infinitely smaller than what we hear, the similarities probably outweigh the differences.

Russian composer Alexander Scriabin thought that he could feel the relationship between color and sound, and he wrote his symphony, Prometheus, Poem of Fire, based on his belief, using the color chart below:

Other sources disagree, but – right or wrong – he made some pretty impressive music.

The Rosicrucian Society does not think C is red.  Their chart places C closer to the middle of the visible light spectrum:

 

The C above middle C on the eight note scale common to Western music is twice the frequency of middle C, so taking a purely mathematical approach, we could simply keep doubling the frequency (or halving the wavelength, which is just another way of saying the same thing) of C until the product lands somewhere within the range of visible light. If we do that, C ends up being a shade of green.

That puts C near - but slightly to the left of - the center of the visible light chart – about where middle C lies on the keys of a piano. That may or may not be significant – I did find it interesting.

A music scholar named Charles Lucy produced a chart based on frequency doubling that looks like this:

There a couple of things I find strange about Lucy’s chart.  First, the key of F falls outside the visible spectrum, and while F-sharp is infrared, F-flat appears on the other end of the chart at ultraviolet.  I am not questioning that; I assume his math is correct.  It just seems odd.

Second, his “Lucy Tuned” scale shows notes like A-sharp and B-flat as distinct notes with separate frequencies.

Hmmmmn. – That might be true if you’re playing a Theremin or a steel guitar, but on a piano, they share the same key.

Of course, none of this takes into account things like resonance and harmonics.  We know, for example, that E-flat played on a xylophone sounds different from the same note played on a trombone.  I can’t help wondering if it looks different, too.