As the name of this group and its aim would suggest we will discuss how people experience music. I have, since the age of three years always heard music in colours. Different notes have colour. C is ivory coloured. D is mauve, E is honey gold, F is blue. These are of course all notes and when the these are major chords. In minor chords the entire colour changes. Let us hear your experiences with sound and music.
Wow, that hasn't happened to me since I quit doing mescaline, decades ago. A lot of musicians have claimed to experience/associate specific colors with specific pitches, scales, keys, harmonies, etc., among the notable ones, Messiaen and Scriabin. Scriabin even tried to devise a series of "color octaves" from which to provide light shows for his music (see his composition "Prometheus", Op. 60, 1910). Problem is, no two musicians ever seem to associate color with sound in the same -- or even remotely similar ways -- so there's never been any agreement on which colors should go where. I dunno... this sort of thing always seems to go back to the old classical versus romantic argument: whether one perceives sounds as abstract things unto themselves, or whether one perceives them as representative or symbolic of other things.
This is a good idea vanilla-m. I don't know that there are more than 3-4 others here on cafe who can stand this kind of thing (and confess that I followed DrH here). My thing is really as an aesthete...I'm doomed to live in Dante's hells (for ever and ever) I look forward to sharing/learning...and talking about Terrance McKenna ; )
The kind of synesthesia the OP's talking about is actually pretty rare, sans psychoactive drugs, but it does exist for some people. For someone with true synesthesia a C-major chord may do more than just evoke a sense of "purple" (or whatever), the visual cortex of their brain will be activated and they will actually see a flash of purple. What I find far more common is for certain pieces of music to evoke strong memories, often of the first time I heard that piece. For example, there are certain parts of Greig's Peer Gynt suite that always flash me back to my elementary school auditorium, where I first heard the music as an accompaniment to some particularly vivid animated imagry in an educational movie we were being shown. The connection is so strong that it's hard for me to listen to the whole suite without getting that image, which can sometimes distract from my full enjoyment of the rest of the music. OTOH, sometimes it's interesting to listen to certain music to deliberately evoke certain memories more vividly. But not all music does this for me; only certain tunes seem to have particularly vivid associations.
