March 23, 2012
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Synesthesia *and* Perfect Pitch? Hey, thanks guys, for the head’s up!
Woulda been a nice touch if someone had clued me in at an earlier age.
On the number=color thing I do remember when it became clear, finally, that I was a weirdo.
Second grade. Teacher asked what’s seven times twelve? and I answered ‘yellow ‘n-blue, of course!’ Must’ve been in a rare confident mood. Dumb looks all around. I covered my tracks with ’84′ but asked my ‘fiance’ at the time, Sandra Milligan, at recess, why the teacher was ‘being mean to me’. She tried to tactfully explain that numbers are numbers, and colors are colors, and never the twain… Whatevah, she had no idea what I was talking about.
So I dumped her. But none of the other proto-chicks showed any understanding of numbers, (and letters too, ugh!) having their god-given colors either, and so I spent my final year, 2nd grade, in the public education system an outcast, wondering if I was perhaps the Return of the Messiah I’d heard some talk about.
Perfect pitch was equally hard on me. My Mom probably had it to some degree, ditto her Dad. Since then I’ve learned what it is, through self-diagnosis, and now know that my first-born, too soon departed, suffered also from the curse/blessing, as does my cousin. But in those days nobody wanted to talk about it. Especially not to a little precocious kid who has colors for every note on the stupid piano. Admit something like that publicly and before you know it he’s gonna ‘think he’s smart’, which in our culture was a sin roughly equal to being a serial killer.
Flash-forward: As of 2012, I know everything Google knows about my ailments. Kandinsky had it, as did Rimsky-Korsakov. Great, now that it’s too late to e-mail them.
And surprisingly, or not, all I really wanna know anymore is the damn mechanism for the beasts; how in the Hell does my brain count vibrations and distinguish between, say, 440 wave-crests per second and 440.5? And why is the number three light green? Yes, ever since I held up three baby fingers in front of my face at age one? It could no more be red than the sky orange, for god’s sake! So what’s the deal with that?I’d love to hear a physics/neurology explanation of my perfect pitch and synesthesia, but in the big picture, it’s prolly more important to figure out why no one wanted to speak up, to warn me, and Beatrice, about Life in all its you-know-whats. Not that we woulda given less milk. Jus sayin…
Comments (32)
Did you write about this a couple of years ago? Parts sound vaguely familiar.
I have the book “Born on a Blue Day” written by a guy with Asperger’s who set the Guinness record for memorizing and reciting pi to 10,000 places or something like that. He does math instantly in his head using shapes and colors. Apparently a number of exceptional people have had synesthesia or related conditions. There’s a guy I saw on an internet video who has been a musical genius since a brain injury a couple of years ago. He writes music compulsively now; it floats through his vision in weird cubes and he suffers until he writes it down. He also plays piano remarkably well as a result of the accident (like in the old joke).
The brain is an amazing thing, capable of remarkable precision. ‘A’ has (presumably) been the same frequency since long before anyone was capable of counting the cycles. How did they preserve it since long before Bach’s time? I guess it was passed on from tuning fork to pitch pipe through the generations.
@Roadkill_Spatula - Tim, you are solidly on-topic. That book was mentioned in several wiki articles I read, trying to assess what I know about my affliction, before writing this.
No, I haven’t before dealt with the issue of the reluctance to simply explain to the child about his ‘different’. And yes, concert-pitch having changed over the years throws a monkey-wrench into my mythical love-affair with the cardinal-red ‘A’. The phenomenon can simply not be explained by any intrinsic connection to particular frequencies; of sound or of light. Cultural artifacts are apparently predominate.
(And a side-point I didn’t address; the decline of the faculty with age: some days I’m actually ‘wrong’ about notes. Ruins my day. Another post.
Music and me just don’t get along. I am baritone and try to be tenor and sometimes bass. I got really jealous of folks with perfect pitch, my girlfriend and brothers had good musical tone training and could keep more on tune than I could.
With math I do the usual cheats. All multiples of nine add up to nine, 27=2+7=9 36= 3+6=9 45= 4+5=9 etc. and my favorite multiplier is ten so you add a zero.
Basically dumb music folks know about F A C E, and Good Boys Deserve fun. But beyond that sharps and flats are a mystery to me.
Did concert pitch change over the years? I didn’t know.
The ability to hear and stay on pitch is a weird thing. In Latin America I’ve heard people tune up a guitar perfectly, pick or strum a lovely intro, and then take off singing in a totally wrong key. How can someone be so good and so bad at music at the same time? Alicia was at a concert last night; she said the singer had great technique and was very good most of the time but in certain songs got noticeably off-key. That’s harder to understand than someone who is consistently sloppy.
Scriabin also had synesthesia. My spell checker doesn’t like that word. Stupid spell checker. Also, with regard to the changing concert A, singers hate it. When they sing with orchestras, it messes with their tessituras and puts register breaks where none existed when they were practising with piano. Stupid concert A. I sang with a huge pipe organ in a cathedral once that is tuned a semi-tone low, like the Baroque lute and other period instruments. That was another kettle of fish. Blue fin, maybe, or red snapper. You choose.
@Roadkill_Spatula - Yes, concert pitch has changed. A went from 415 Hz in Baroque times to 440 Hz in modern times, to a bit higher, as orchestras prefer the brighter sound of 450 or thereabouts. I’m not sure of the last number, actually. Also, tuning methods have changed throughout history. We now have equal temperament or just intonation where there is an equal distance between each semi-tone of the western scale. This was not always the case.
I’ve seen a couple of TV shows about this recently. I can only imagine how frustrating it is to try to describe it to someone. When I first realized that not everyone made up stories in their head, I couldn’t believe it. Fortunately, I was an adult when I found out or I might have felt even more like an outcast.
@elgan - Ha, I’m scared (scarred?) to ask what Mr spel-cheq thought U ment. Very interesting, your thoughts. For me, the maroon of Ab drenched the room. Anything much above or below the stated frequency and I feel ‘nothing’, a fuzzy limbo, an obscure buzz. But then of course, what to make of the very arbitrary choice, in modern times, of the pitches. We can certainl rule out Hindemuth’s wet-dream ‘Music of the Spheres’ argument, also Plato’s for intrinsic qualities. I suppose it’s all from those damn ’78s I grew my baby teeth on. Tschaikovsky, the homo. All his fault:)
@PPhilip - In practice, your tricks and sense is what is mainly used. My ‘skills’ are principally parlour-tricks. And self-amusement, when I need to feel ‘special’. As I tried to point out in the post, this is mainly about psychology.
Thanks for your additions.
@Roadkill_Spatula - probably explained by the local hot spices. No, seriously. I remember whole concerts where I’d stopped at a ‘foreign’ restaurant before going on stage. The whole night I struggled with pitch-sense, as if ‘doin’ it’, y’know, through an inner-tube-thick condom. No colours, no taste.
Wish I’d been there to watch: ‘Guantanemero in ‘F’ accompanied by moi on the guitar, in ‘E’. Makes me smile.
@whyzat - Beautiful. We on the same frequency! That’s the real heart of the post, the need to find out, as you did either in fits and starts or in one memorable episode, that we are slightly ‘different’.
I so hope you didn’t suffer too much asking ‘What’s wrong wid me?” Or had to talk to cows(!) Thanks for reading, my friend.
What I need to know is why the returned Messiah (you are so right about that, I don’t know I didn’t see it earlier) receives instructions from a dream heifer about what to blog on Xanga. Let’s all go over to Revelife and spread the good word!
Myself and a few friends of mine have varying expressions/intensities of synesthesia, so I can feel you there. Perfect pitch though? Can’t say I’ve dealt with that. All the people I know who have it are amazing pianists, but they can’t really sit through anything too “modern” as far as sound goes.
All these years I thought synesthetic had something to do with hedonism. I wonder: If one with synesthesia drops acid, what’s the difference?
@dirtbubble - Long tradition of the Red Heifer. (I had to edit the post some, parts were inaccurate, I’ll be up shortly with a better version, but the same key.)
@HappierHeathen - Yeah, he has to write down what time it was when he dropped, so he’ll know when it’s over, ha
@AftonJoanne - Interesting. It may be that certain forms, like atonal compositions, are just perceived as ‘muddy’, like mixing all the water-colors together in the tray at the end, ha. Thanks for reading. I changed the post some, and do want to write a more accurate and charitable corrected version.
Hey! Thanks for sharing your story. I have a mild form of this =)
1 will ALWAYS be white and it’s always been white. 2 is yellow, 3 is orange. 4 is light blue, 5 is red. 6 is purple, 7 is green, 8 is dark/deep purple. 9 is hazy and dark…perhaps black.
Some people see color when they hear sound. The brain is amazing!
@AncoraImparo - Happy to hear from you. I’m always conflicted when I hear a new careful list of colors, like yours. I mean, they’re true and from the heart, yet it of course raises the question of from whence cometh these particulars. I went so far as to track down my first-grade coloring book for learning numbers, from 1954. Thought I’d struck gold with the big yellow ’8′, a match, but some of the rest were ‘wrong’. So forget that ‘trigger’.
I’m actually oddly close to the color-code for resistors, in electronics. But I don’t remember telling them which colors to use, ha. Must just be something like a spinning-wheel lottery at birth, is all I can conclude.
Thanks so much for sharing/ js
There is a higher number of synthesetes involved in art, music and blogging! I know Adventofreason is one and so is my sister (a math teacher for gifted 6th graders). I have tendencies but it strikes at random intervals. Words have flavor to me. Alliteration is sweet!
That’s very cool, and I am sorry that you suffered for it. I am glad you were able to learn about it later in life and know that many others have it as well. Personally, I have just the barest tinge of synesthesia. It really only messes me up when we play with colored dominoes because some ridiculous person made the 11 maroon when clearly it should be pale and 12 is maroon. I’m hopeless at math anyway though.
Actually now that I think about it, that may not be synesthesia because it’s more like they’re super-connected than like they’re the same thing.
I do think, though, that a lot of people have just a touch of that and similar rarities. Our brains are so fascinating, I just love reading about things like this.
I wish I had your condition. Life would be so much more exciting if I were able to see sounds and taste words.
@murisopsis - Yes, it’s truly a varied and broad-spectrum ‘disorder’, unlike, say, diptheria, with a simple blood test. My own case is so life-long, profound, and automatic that I’ve accepted that there’s no wiggle-room, so to speak. Thanks for telling me about your friends. Ha, I’ll read their posts now for tell-tale signs. Always sweet to hear from you/ js
@lanney - A great point you make: precisely because the connections we feel, in varying degrees, often go un-addressed, we tend to relegate them to ‘yeah, odd… ok, what’s for dinner?’ I will advise you, as the mood arises, to get as much of a handle as possible on your own preferences. It’s both fun and instructive, plus helps to count dominos, ha.
Many thanks for the treat of your thoughts.
@PervyPenguin - ’Interesting’, yes, but ‘exciting? Not always. Some folks speak in dull shades of gray and brown, and one stands there, impatient, waiting for a bit of colour. Like wishing a black and white penguin had a red hat, I suppose, ha
Nice to see you visit here.
I’d love to have perfect pitch. But seeing colors in numbers seems like a never ending acid trip.
@sometimestheycomebackanyway - Actually, it helps greatly to remember phone numbers; at least I have that.
And the thing about acid, (speaking from some fairly extensive experience), is that as long as you know it’s a chemical hallucination, you are ok. The same goes for the ‘colours’, which by age 62 have become a standard part of my life, and not upsetting in the slightest.
And so, to the extent where my political and/or theological opinions differ from yours, if at all, they are manifestly ‘of this world’, and only rarely ‘hallucinations’. (Just thought it’d be fun to throw that in.)
Always nice to see your thoughts here.
You’d think with all the music I listen to, I’d have an idea to contribute. I know that a perfect pitch can help complete a perfect game in baseball (and I’m not even a baseball fan) but really I don’t know the difference between pluperfect or perfect. Except, I have two t-shirts that say I’m perfect. They are two of my least favorite t-shirts, because I hate to appear the braggart.
Howm I doin on practicin humble?
@twoberry - ha, I’d say ya got a right to feel pretty damned proud of your progress in the humility department.
My question here, which didn’t get much new data, is how the brain, without a crystal clock, does what an electronic circuit does, and with seemingly no thought involved. The accuracy is on the order of 1/10 of one percent in error.
But I was listening to my chirping Scope’s Owls last night also. Always a perfect C#. And for hours, in all kinds of weather. 20 chirps per minute. How deh do dat?
My grandaughter has perfect pitch and I have 0 pitch, which led to the following: when she was about 3 and was sitting in my lap, I began to “sing” a lullaby. She looked at me and said “Grandpa, please don’t sing.”
@DEISENBERG - ha, reminds me of when I was laying concrete blocks for the first time and a 5 year-old neighbor girl came up and asked “Did you ever do this before?” She must have had concrete pitch.