The Figure 5 in Gold, Charles Demuth, 1928
“I have this rather freakish gift of seeing letters in color,” novelist Vladimir Nabokov told a BBC interviewer in 1962. “It’s called color hearing. Perhaps one in a thousand has that.”
The Russian-born author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and other exuberantly witty books claimed that when he was a child, he saw the number 5 as red, and that he had continued to perceive numbers and letters as having their own distinctive hues. The interviewer asked Nabokov how the initials of his own name appeared to him. He replied:
V is a kind of pale, transparent pink: I think it’s called, technically, quartz pink: this is one of the closest colors that I can connect with the V. And the N, on the other hand, is a greyish-yellowish oatmeal color. But a funny thing happens: my wife has this gift of seeing letters in color, too, but her colors are completely different. There are, perhaps, two or three letters where we coincide, but otherwise the colors are quite different.
It turned out, we discovered one day, that my son, who was a little boy at the time — I think he was 10 or 11 — sees letters in colors, too. Quite naturally he would say, “Oh, this isn’t that color, this is this color,” and so on. Then we asked him to list his colors and we discovered that in one case, one letter which he sees as purple, or perhaps mauve, is pink to me and blue to my wife. This is the letter M. So the combination of pink and blue makes lilac in his case. Which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle.
Nabokov’s “color hearing” — a curious neurological phenomenon known as grapheme-color synesthesia — also found its way into his books. In Bend Sinister, the protagonist, Adam Krug, says that the word “loyalty” reminds him of “a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk.”
In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov launches into a virtuoso synaesthetic reverie: ”The long a of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand-mirror of o take care of the white… Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z and huckleberry h. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”
One of the ravishing pleasures of reading Nabokov is sensing a deep rightness in his word choices (even in English, which was his second language) that goes beyond having a knack for finding le mot juste to make his prose cohere at every level: phonetic, orthographic, and semiotic. Surely the atypical wiring of his brain gave Nabokov an advantage in his quest for this comprehensive unity.
Synaesthetic alphabet
Few writers have mapped this uncanny phenomenon with such obsessive precision, but the gift of multiplex senses turns out to be not as freakish and rare as Nabokov believed. Researchers have learned that even chimpanzees associate low notes with darker colors with high notes with brighter ones. In a recent paper in Psychological Science, David Eagelman of the Baylor College of Medicine argues [PDF link] that synaesthetic ability falls along a spectrum, the end product of multiple processes of neuronal excitation, inhibition, and pruning in the brain gone awry, “all of which happen to converge on the similar result of unusual perceptual or cognitive pairings.”
Another recent study raises the possibility that we are all born with a capacity for sensory crosstalk that diminishes as we get older and our neural networks are streamlined for greater efficiency. Nabokov also believed that we are all born synaesthetes, but because science hadn’t yet elaborated the concept of neuroplasticity, he blamed the loss of the gift on “stupid parents” telling their kids, “It’s all nonsense. An A isn’t black, a B isn’t brown. Don’t be absurd.”
In fact, however, hacking the firewalls between senses may turn out to be a useful skill that parents could teach kids who were not born that way. In an ingeniously designed blog post, Macquarie University autism researcher Jon Brock discussed a recent report by V.S. Ramachandran in Neurocase [PDF link] of a young man with Asperger’s syndrome who was instructed to associate emotions with colors to improve his social perspicacity. As he got older, the young man learned to gauge how he felt about a person by the color of the “halo” around the face.
Nabokov was not alone in his conscious employment of his gift to serve his art. Master painter and digital artist David Hockney relies on his synaesthesic abilities to generate hyper-vivid images that glow with an almost child-like visual innocence. He told author David Burton that when he was designing a set featuring the image of a tree for a production at the Metropolitan Opera of a piece by Maurice Ravel, he listened to the relevant section of the score and “the tree painted itself.”
Felled Trees by David Hockney
Likewise, the genre-stretching jazz, folk-rock, and avant-garde music of Duke Ellington, Syd Barrett, Alexander Scriabin, and Oliver Messaien [PDF link] was allegedly energized by each composers’ bimodal perceptions. In his epic multi-volume manifesto Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (“Treatise on rhythm, color and bird song”), Messiaen described chords as “blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white.”
For a drearily mono-sensory person like me, it’s tough to read these accounts without feeling a (sour-apple green?) twinge of envy. What would it be like to live in a world in which each prime number generated its own harmonics, every letter of the alphabet was associated with a characteristic odor (the freshly laundered scent of L, the fulsome perfume of Q), and Miles Davis’ “Flamenco Sketches” (on Kind of Blue, natch) shimmered like an iridescent watercolor over the heads of the bored baristas at the local coffee shop?
Color music notation
Now a prolific multimedia artist and writer named Perry Hall [Flash required], who was born with his own version of Nabokov’s quirky gift, has developed an iPhone/iPad app called Sonified that enables even those low on the synaesthetic spectrum to experience light, colors, and movement morphing into sounds.
I first became interested in Hall’s work seeing a series of haunting HD videos made in 2006 that he called Material Study, featuring light dancing on the surfaces of ferrofluids that surge and swell like some kind of protean lava. While convalescing from a bout of Lyme disease, Hall decided that he needed to set his synaesthesia loose in the wild, as he puts it. He and his digital collaborators developed software that siphons the luminance and color values from the video cameras in iPhones and iPads (only later-generation devices like the iPhone 4, 4S and iPad 2 will work correctly) and uses them to trigger stereo samples from a library of CD-quality audio composed for the purpose.
Perry Hall, artist, synaesthete, and designer of Sonified
When Hall — who helped create the lush “painted world” sequence in What Dreams May Come, the 1998 film starring Robin Williams – told me about Sonified in email, I knew I had to try it myself. After downloading it from the App Store, I boarded a streetcar here in San Francisco, slipped on a pair of headphones, and aimed my phone out the window just as the train streaked past a row of brightly painted Victorian houses, accelerating through shafts of sunlight and shade on its way into a tunnel.
The effect of the audio-visual-kinesthetic link-up was unexpectedly profound. Instead of feeling like Sonified was imposing its digital soundtrack on the world, I felt I was accessing a layer of reality that is normally hidden from us. It was like a little dose of Morpheus’ red pill in The Matrix.
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