Musical pitch classes have rainbow hues in pitch class-color synesthesia

Kosuke Itoh,Honami Sakata,Ingrid L Kwee,Tsutomu Nakada

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-18150-y

Kosuke Itoh, Honami Sakata + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18150-y

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Abstract

Synesthesia, an anomalous blending of senses in which stimulation of one sensory modality produces sensation in a different modality, provides a unique opportunity to study how multimodal information is represented in the human brain. We investigated how pitch classes (do, re, mi, etc.) are associated with the three dimensions of color (hue, saturation, and value/brightness) in 15 subjects who possessed “pitch class-color synesthesia”. Across-subject averaging of reported colors revealed that pitch classes have rainbow hues, beginning with do-red, re-yellow, and so forth, ending with si-violet, accompanied by a decrease in saturation. Enharmonic pitch classes that referred to the same pitch class with a different name produced color sensations according to the name of the base pitch class, e.g., a reddish color for do-sharp and a yellowish color for re-flat. Thus the main factor producing color sensations was the name, not the sound, of the note; behavioral experiments corroborated this interpretation. Pitch class-color synesthesia represents a newly described type of synesthesia that is distinct from the well-known crossmodal association between pitch height and value/brightness. Findings suggest that the two dimensions of musical pitch, pitch class and pitch height, are mapped to the hue-saturation plane and the value/brightness dimension of color, respectively.

Highlights

Synesthesia, an anomalous blending of senses in which stimulation of one sensory modality produces sensation in a different modality, provides a unique opportunity to study how multimodal information is represented in the human brain
absolute pitch (AP) is acquired through early music training[11,12], and all participants in this study had received formal music training outside of standard school education; their average (± standard deviations, s.d.) number of years in training was 13.8 ± 3.2 years, and they had started at a mean age of 4.9 ± 2.1
The study provided the first detailed experimental investigation into “pitch class-color synesthesia,” which has been clearly distinguished in definition and phenomenon from the well-described crossmodal association between pitch height and brightness/lightness

Summary

Introduction

Synesthesia, an anomalous blending of senses in which stimulation of one sensory modality produces sensation in a different modality, provides a unique opportunity to study how multimodal information is represented in the human brain. We investigated how pitch classes (do, re, mi, etc.) are associated with the three dimensions of color (hue, saturation, and value/brightness) in 15 subjects who possessed “pitch class-color synesthesia”. In contrast to the rather universal correlation between pitch height and brightness, color sensations associated with a given pitch class appear to differ widely from individual to individual. This is illustrated by the well-known story of such disagreement between the two synesthetic composers, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Franz Liszt[8]. We systematically investigated whether there is any rule of how pitch classes are mapped to a three-dimensional color space, namely hue (H), saturation (S), and value/brightness (V), in fifteen pitch class-color synesthetic subjects

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