What Is Synesthesia in Musicians?

Commentary

There is this issue that some musicians have called perfect pitch. It’s different from relative pitch. I have that simply from a lifetime of experience. It means that I can roughly guess the note within a half step based on how it feels on my throat. I can be correct most of the time if you give me time.

That’s not perfect pitch. With that skill, the precise note takes on a special realness of a different sort. It actually exists in the mind as if it is a physical thing. You know what it is. An A sounds like an A. A C is a C. And so on. These people don’t need tuning forks or keyboards. They can produce a D# very quickly and be correct every time.

I find this skill to be nearly mystifying. I’ve known probably four people with this. One was happy but an exacting musician. He never liked to sing with me because my intonation was off a bit and it drove him nuts. Another simply could never go to concerts because the tuning problems made her crazy to the point that she wanted to walk out. Another person could never be in a bar with live music. It was like nails on a chalkboard.

In other words, while it seems as if perfect pitch is what you want, it actually is not what you want. It approaches being disabling, nearly a malady. Most people who have perfect pitch would rather they did not have it. Its main contribution to their lives is to turn what seems like normal life tunes into an unbearable racket.

Here’s the thing. You cannot actually train to gain perfect pitch. You have it or you do not. You can cultivate and refine what you have, but you cannot actually teach it. It is a mind thing, and likely genetic. A 2020 meta-analysis makes it clear that perfect pitch is mostly, if not entirely, genetic. The same study, by the way, finds that this is true of high levels of musical skill.

To be sure, there is a very strong element of environmental influence in musicians that is simply undeniable. The parents who insist that their children become proficient at piano are likely pianists themselves. Two sets of musician parents are far more likely to produce musician children. Obviously.

It’s not like this with perfect pitch. It has some kind of biological root. The gene that produces it appears like many genetic traits, hopping around in ways that are impossible to game but also clearly biological or neurological.

This rather amazes me. There is a broader issue here about how different kinds of minds perceive with sensory perceptions a range of different stimulants in different ways.

I recall thinking about this when I was very little. My parents would say, “This is blue,” and I took their word for it. But later I began to wonder: How do I know for sure that what they are calling blue appears to them the same way as blue appears to me? What if we all see colors differently and do not know it?

That’s the kind of big thought you have when you are young and let go of later in life. But the point remains. Minds are different. We are all given five senses if we are lucky. How they are deployed in different ways differs from person to person. Some people gag on the perfumes that others love. Some people like hard mattresses and others soft. Some people cannot stand bright lights, and others are fine with them.

This is all a hugely interesting topic, and it speaks to our favorite childhood question: What is your favorite color? All kids love to choose a favorite color and talk about it. They are intrigued to find that others like different colors from what they like.

Realizing this is an early path to perceiving ourselves as individuals—something distinct from others. It underscores the ways in which our minds are our own. We speak casually and say, “We are of the same mind,” but it is never really true. Every mind is different, and this difference affects the way our senses work.

Perfect pitch is an example of that. I might want it, but I cannot get it. Those who have it might want to get rid of it but cannot. It is just part of how we are built. Even someone who has perfect pitch might never know the names of notes, but sounds still arrive in their minds as distinct units all their own. This goes far beyond what is high and what is low. It is much more precise than that and traces to the physicality of music itself and the vibrations it makes.

Now to the topic that has inspired this article. It was my great honor to interview a famous film composer recently for the Brownstone Show. In the pre-interview, she revealed to me that she has synesthesia; that is, the irrepressible capacity to see sounds as colors. I nearly dropped the phone in astonishment.

I’ve heard of others who had synesthesia in history. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) of the University of Paris came to mind. He was a great organist who specialized in composing suites based on bird songs. I’m not a huge fan of his music, but there is no question of its brilliance or his astonishing skill and understanding. He is the creator of the “modes of limited transposition,” a system of classification that I cannot begin to fathom. Fortunately, in my profession, I don’t need to.

In any case, Messiaen had synesthesia such that every bit of music he heard, even from birds, processed in his mind not only with his capacity for perfect pitch but also as a large painting with colors. As the music would move, so would the colors. He had absolutely no doubt that this was happening in real time even if people around him could not see what he saw.

This is an extremely uncommon trait. I never imagined that I would speak to anyone who had synesthesia. I did, and her name is Deborah Lurie. She has dozens of film credits as a composer and arranger. She is immensely gifted, and her music really does speak directly to the soul, with complicated chord modulations that really do sound like colors. In her mind, they are colors. You can hear an example with a piece she wrote for the film “An Unfinished Life.”

I asked her a question. At what point in life did you discover that this capacity you have is different from how others experience the same music? She said it was in middle school when her choir teacher asked the choir to sing the same piece up a whole step as a test of range. She said to her neighbor that the teacher changed the song from green to blue. Her neighbor looked at her as if she was insane.

“What are you talking about?”

“The music. It was green, and now we will sing it in blue.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

That was the beginning of the realization. There is some amazing neurodivergence here, neither curse nor gift, just difference. The sensory perceptions in the brain bleed from one to another. It would be like hearing what you touch or smelling what you see.

Such a capacity would not be usual, to say the least. It’s this way with seeing what you hear. You can use your imagination to think of things, but this is not the same. Sounds do not exist in most of our minds as objective visual things beyond something that merely reminds us of some experience. For the sound to occupy a physicality in our minds is what is strangely wonderful.

In any case, Deborah is an unusual person who has it, and it has served her well. Even if it did not, it hardly matters. Synesthesia is something you have or do not have, and no amount of training, experience, or exposure can grant it to you.

What a beautiful tribute to the mysteries of the human mind and its mixture with art and creativity! We do not all think and perceive the same way, a point that gets to the essential case for freedom and methodological individualism. There is no “warmth” to collectivism because there is no such thing as collectivism that does not crush what makes us all distinct.

Deborah herself has written on this topic. Her insights on the relationships between shapes, structure, and harmonics are profound, precisely what one might expect from such a mind. She delves deeply into a fascinating shift that took place between the medieval and Enlightenment periods of music, which chose a force structure of pitch and harmonics over a more physically based system of the ancient world. Too much to explain here, but you see where this is going.

Now that you know about this interesting pattern that exists among precious few people in this world, you might put some thought into all the ways in which each of us has our own distinct gifts as individuals that set us apart from others. You have them, and I have them. We are all gifted in some way. This is precisely why we need societies of freedom and human rights to protect every soul from harm.

My interview with Deborah Lurie will be out soon.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.