Synesthesia in brief
The term synesthesia is derived from two Greek words: syn (together) and aisthesis (sense). In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke mentioned a case of synesthesia, describing a blind man who, when asked what the color purple was, replied, "It resembles trumpeting." More generally, the idea of a link between music and fine art can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who was the first to apply the musical terms "pitch" and "harmony" to painting. It is also worth noting that Beethoven referred to B minor as the "black clef" and D major as the "orange clef," while Schubert compared E minor to "a young lady dressed in white, with a pink and red bow on her chest."
In his essays, Kandinsky recalled that he used to hear a strange hissing noise when he mixed colors on his palette. He described his impression of Wagner's Lohengrin as follows: "The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." This impression, perhaps accidentally, became one of the main motives that inspired the promising thirty-year-old lawyer to transform his life and become a painter.
"Color study with lozenges", 1913
As for Kandinsky, some skeptics question whether he had synesthesia inherently or whether it developed as a result of his experiments with color theory, as well as with the ideas of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Rudolf Steiner. Others believe that synesthesia is merely an individual sensation with no connection to human physiology.
However, a group of neuroscientists has recently managed to prove that a synesthete can indeed "see" sound. A series of experiments showed that blindfolded participants exhibited activity in brain areas responsible for visual activity when they listened to sounds. The only thing left to do now is to find the gene responsible for this phenomenon.
