Grooming a Synesthete

Longtime readers know I have perfect pitch. I consider it one of my personal assets. When I was growing up, I never knew anyone else who had perfect pitch. Not until I went to Fontainebleau, France, in the summer of 1971 to study with Nadia Boulanger did I meet anyone else with this gift.

Occasionally I will perceive or think of numbers and notes as colors. In music, E is normally red to me. D is normally yellow. C is white. F is green. I don't talk about it. It's just how I think—to me it's no big deal. My perfect pitch is a much bigger deal to me, and something I am constantly grateful to have been gifted with.

In fact, I didn't think this note/color thing was anything, didn't think it was a condition or syndrome or that it had a name until reading Oliver Sacks' "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain." The phenomenon is known as synesthesia. Of famous composers, Duke Ellington, Franz Liszt, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Olivier Messiaen are all reported to have experienced it.

This morning Tyler called to tell me he had been supervising Ridley's morning piano practice. She had been plodding along, rather bored, with one of her Suzuki pieces. He tried to think how to infuse her with a little interest. He suggested she play it as if it were a dance, and he danced around the music room a little to illustrate. She played the piece again, and her performance was greatly improved. When he asked her how that sounded to her, whether it sounded different, she said, "Yes. Before it was black. This time it was pink."

Hallelujah! I think we have a little synesthete on our hands. How fun it will be to watch how this develops and where she can take her musical gifts.

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If you'd like to learn more, try searching on synesthesia or "synesthesia music". Do you think you might have synesthesia? There's a battery of tests you can take at synesthete.org.

The more I search and dig, the more interested I become. I do highly recommend "Musicophilia," which contains lots of interesting information about the intersection of neurology and music.