getting synesthetic
if you’re like me, one of your favourite pastimes is licking toads, firing up some allman bros on your microsoft zune, and finger-painting with fastfood condiments until your mom comes in and tells you to clean up your mess and remove your goth makeup and take off your sequined cocktail dress and stop feeding your mogwai after midnight.
maybe, however you’re like annie besant and c.w. leadbeater who, in their 1901 book thought-forms, instead of finger-painting to the allman bros, thought it might be an enjoyable exercise to try and render the sound of wagner, gounod, and mendelssohn into oil paintings.
the resulting images could certainly be considered an early demonstration of synesthesia: the super power which permitted nabokov to see words as colours and some guy named james wannerton to “taste” sounds.
Many people are aware that sound is always associated with colour—that when, for example, a musical note is sounded, a flash of colour corresponding to it may be seen by those whose finer senses are already to some extent developed. It seems not to be so generally known that sound produces form as well as colour, and that every piece of music leaves behind it an impression of this nature, which persists for some considerable time, and is clearly visible and intelligible to those who have eyes to see.
in [the Mendelssohn plate] we have a small and comparatively simple form pourtrayed in considerable detail, something of the effect of each note being given; in [the Gounod plate] we have a more elaborate form of very different character delineated with less detail, since no attempt is made to render the separate notes, but only to show how each chord expresses itself in form and colour; in [the Wagner plate] we have a still greater and richer form, in the depiction of which all detail is avoided, in order that the full effect of the piece as a whole may be approximately given.
if your zune is loaded with felix mendelssohn’s no. 9 of “songs without words,” or charles gounod’s soldiers chorus from “faust”, or richard wagner’s overture to “the meistersingers,” you can listen to these pieces as you go about your gardening work. or if you are an elite synesthete, you can give these striking images a once-over and be left with a similar aesthetic aftertaste.
