A case of synaesthesia / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Myers, Charles S. (Charles Samuel), 1873-1946.
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A case of synaesthesia / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/16 (page 234)
    solely to musical sounds. Moreover, very many of those cases of synaesthesia which at first sight resembles M’s, are fundamentally different. In one class of such synaesthesiae, the notes of an octave have each a different colour, and these colours are repeated in the corresponding notes of all other octaves. The colour, in fact, is attached not so much to the absolute pitch of the tone as to its name or its position in the octave. In many of these cases it appears that the synaesthesia is really derived from that of the vowel in the name of the tone. Thus in a case reported by J. Breton1, we have the following correspondence between the colour of the tone and that of the vowel contained in the name of the tone: Name of note Do Re' Mi1 Si Fa La Colour of tone Black and white Brown Red Grey Vowel sound 0 E I A Colour of vowel Grey-black Colour of undyed wool [beige) Red Black and white But even in this case there is one colour which cannot be thus • ^ explained ; the note Sol was red, yet we have no report that 0 had this colour. And in another case2 though the note a and the vowel a and the note e and the vowel e were of the same colour respectively, yet other notes had colours independent of their letters and preserved their colours even when the experimenter succeeded in puzzling the subject so that he was uncertain of the name of the note. Obviously subjects of this class have, as a rule, very considerable musical ability. Their colours are usually distinctly affected by sharpening or lowering the pitch of a given note. They insist that the major chords have a brighter colour than the minor, that the colour of a piece of music is determined by the key or by the composer3, and so on. From this type of tone synaesthesia, M’s case is clearly distinct. Nor does it coincide with another type in which association with the colour of the instrument plays a part4. There is no reason why the colour of the tones of a violin should lie between pink and blue or those of a bassoon be between brown and yellow, if the colour of the tones of different pitch had been derived from the instruments producing them. 1 Cited by Henri Laures, Les Synesthesies, Paris, 1908. 2 R. Lach, “ Ueber einen interessaaten Spezialfall von Audition Coloree,” Sammelbd. d. Internat. Musikgesell. 1902, iv. 589. 3 Cf. Th. Flournoy, Des phenornenes de Synopsie, Paris, 1893, p. 100. 4 Ibid. p. 600.