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Comment by arxpoetica | Hacker News Reader

As a musician and artist who experiences mild synesthesia, this is throwing me off. I don't associate the colors illustrated in the example with the sounds I'm hearing.

I don't have anything other than personal experience to back this up, but I would be surprised if it's not a completely subjective experience—one person's synesthesia probably doesn't match another person's, per se.

Just curious for any musician's out there, when you're playing in the key of D dorian, for example, what colors go through your mind? F major? E minor?

All these have specific colors that tend to dominate my imagination.

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Exactly. Now, what would be really cool is if you could build a questionnaire, similar to a personality test, that would match you up with the right color/sound scheme. So at the end of the questionnaire, you can verify the results by listening to the Kandinsky piece and see if we got your associations right.

On your subject of an online questionnaire for synesthesia, I'm almost certain there was a post on HN related to this, but I don't find it in my bookmark library. But I think I found the same article with a Google search. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... is a paper describing an online survey of colors versus letters, the url for the survey is in the paper, is still registered, but doesn't seem to be responding to me at the moment. Over 6500 people had taken the survey at that time. A strange correlation appeared when they looked at the data. They accidentally tracked down that that a Fisher Price toy with colored letters matched the correlation. And people who took the survey but were not the age where they would have been exposed to this toy did not show the correlation. You can find lots of related posts with a Google search for Fisher Price synesthesia or perhaps other plausible key words. If you could use similar methods and look for correlations between notes and colors then there might be some toy that young children experienced for many many hours that might explain some of this.

>I don't have anything other than personal experience to back this up, but I would be surprised if it's not a completely subjective experience—one person's synesthesia probably doesn't match another person's, per se.

From what I recall from the literature (it was a while ago, so details elude me), that while there does seem to be some relatively common experiences (many people associating a particular number with a particular colour), there's definitely a lot that's very idiosyncratic. I recall some people speculating that some of these associations could be shared because of common books/teaching materials, that maybe many children grew up with the same books showing letters and numbers in various colours. But that's just speculation as far as I'm aware.

Agreed, violins are green not red (not a joke, I 'm synaesthetic)

For me they're green or purple

This is exactly what my wife said when she went to that site. Synethesia is personal in its details.

I've wondered if I have synesthesia. When I play music I don't literally "see" colours anywhere except in my mind's eye, but I definitely associate certain notes with certain colours. It's not something I think about actively or even notice unless I'm paying attention, but it's definitely there.

And it's only really when I'm playing music (I play guitar), not when I'm listening to it. It's less about keys than it is about specific notes. A is red, B is blue. C is more yellowy orange. E is... I'm not sure, just dark, maybe black? G is kinda dark blue, maybe turquoise.

This is the hardest I've ever thought about it and the first time I've ever tried to write it down, but those associations are definitely there and have been there for as long as I can remember, and I've been playing guitar for at least 15 years.

Do I have synesthesia?

> I would be surprised if it's not a completely subjective experience—one person's synesthesia probably doesn't match another person's, per se.

I was wondering this too. Since they used machine learning instead of medical data, it means that each synesthesia case may be unique enough to throw off a synesthesia-color/shape catalog.

Kandinsky might have ended painting abstract art because normal art was ruined by his synesthesia, just as his abstract art is incomprehensible to someone without his kind of synesthesia.

Question, is the association for you with a singular sound or with a series of sounds (as found in the simulator)?

Not to be a bit evasive, but...both?

Part of it is very abstract and arbitrarily associative. As well, it can certainly morph. I wouldn't say there's any specific rhyme or reason to it.

If you ever watched the movie Soul—that spoke to me pretty well, even though they didn't focus specifically on synesthesia, per se.

Key of D is typically black for me. For dorian F-natural is a soft shade of red. The B natural is purple.

F major is red. E-minor is a desert sand color.

You also have perfect pitch? Is this common for people with synesthesia?

I don't have perfect pitch so it's not that I hear a note and see the color it's more like when I think of a note, chord, or mode I see a color in my minds eye. When I'm playing I am aware at a high level the notes I'm playing and their colors.

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