Famous synesthetes

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[edit] Synesthetes

There is a great deal of debate about whether or not synesthesia can be identified through historical sources. Sean A. Day, a synesthete, and the President of the American Synesthesia Association, maintains a list of synesthetes, "pseudosynesthetes" and individuals who are most likely not synesthetic, but who used synesthesia in their art or music.


"He gets on with the broad strokes, textures and colors — that’s how he hears music, he’s got that synesthesia (a phenomenon where sounds have color), he says ‘make it really sad, like a rainy day, I want to hear thunder’ — and I get on with all the anal fiddly bits."

— Sister Bliss talking about her working relationship with Rollo Armstrong[1]


  • Amy Beach (September 5, 1867 – December 27, 1944), American pianist and composer.
It turns out that the 19th-century American classical composer Amy Beach had both perfect pitch and a set of colors for musical keys (musical keys → color). Here are two quotes from biographies:

"Other interesting stories about Amy’s musical personality and her astounding abilities as a prodigy are recounted in almost all previous biographical writings. One such story is Amy’s association of certain colors with certain keys. For instance, Amy might ask her mother to play the ‘purple music’ or the ‘green music.’ The most popular story, however, seems to be the one about Amy’s going on a trip to California and notating on staff paper the exact pitches of bird calls she heard."

— From Jeanell Brown, p. 16[2]

"Amy’s mother encouraged her to relate melodies to the colors blue, pink, or purple, but before long Amy had a wider range of colors, which she associated with certain major keys. Thus C was white, F-sharp black, E yellow, G red, A green, A-flat blue, D-flat violet or purple, and E-flat pink. Until the end of her life she associated these colors with those keys."

— From Walter Jenkins, pp. 5-6. [3]


DeCaprio is a member of the Synesthesia List, and has outlined his musical note → color synesthesia there, as well as on his own website.


  • Duke Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974), composer and pianist. Timbre → color.

"I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one color. I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different color. When I hear sustained musical tones, I see just about the same colors that you do, but I see them in textures. If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin."

— Ellington, as quoted in Don George, p. 226. [4]


  • Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988), physicist. Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. Feynman had colored letters and numbers (graphemes → color).

"When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students."

— From Richard Feynman, p. 59. [5]


Hockney sees synesthetic colors to musical stimuli. In general, this does not show up in his painting or photography artwork too much. However, it is a common underlying principle in his construction of stage sets for various ballets and operas, where he bases the background colors and lighting upon his own seen colors while listening to the music of the theater piece he is working on.[6]


  • Brooks Kerr, jazz pianist. Musical notes → color.

"With the little bit of sight he possessed, Brooks was unable to read or to identify objects, and lead sheets remained a forever closed door to him, but he was able to differentiate colors. I remember when he first told us that in his mind’s eye every musical note was a different color and that the scale resembled a rainbow. He fingered a C on the piano, explaining, ‘This note is red.’ He hit a D. ‘This one is dark blue.’ He hit an F. ‘This is yellow.’ His finger wandered to a G. ‘This one is light blue …’"

— From Don George, pp. 225-226. [7]


  • György Ligeti (May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006), composer. Grapheme → color.

""I am inclined to synaesthetic perception. I associate sounds with colours and shapes. Like Rimbaud, I feel that all letters have a colour." "Major chords are red or pink, minor chords are somewhere between green and brown. I do not have perfect pitch, so when I say that C minor has a rusty red-brown colour and D minor is brown this does not come from the pitch but from the letters C and D. I think it must go back to my childhood. I find, for instance, that numbers also have colours; 1 is steely grey, 2 is orange, 5 is green. At some point these associations must have got fixed, perhaps I saw the green number 5 on a stamp or on a shop sign. But there must be some collective associations too. For most people the sound of a trumpet is probably yellow although I find it red because of its shrillness …."

— From György Ligeti, p. 58. [8]


  • Franz Liszt (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886), composer. Music → color.

"When Liszt first began as Kapellmeister in Weimar (1842), it astonished the orchestra that he said: 'O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!' Or: 'That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!' First the orchestra believed Liszt just joked; more later they got accustomed to the fact that the great musician seemed to see colors there, where there were only tones."

— Anonymous, as quoted in Friedrich Mahling, p. 230. (Translation by Sean A. Day.) [9]


  • Olivier Messiaen (December 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992), composer and organist. Chordal structure → color.
Olivier Messiaen was self-admittedly a synesthete, as is quite well detailed in his own writings and in interviews. Many of his compositions, such as Oiseaux Exotiques, L'ascension, and Couleurs de la cite celeste, are directly based upon his, in a sense, trying to "produce pictures" via sound, writing specific notes to produce specific color sequences and blends.[10]


  • Stephanie Morgenstern (born 10 December 1965), actress and film director. Graphemes → color; musical notes → color.[11]

"A few years ago, I mentioned to a friend that I remembered phone numbers by their colour. He said "So you're a synesthete!" I hadn't heard of synesthesia (which means something close to sense-fusion') – I only knew that numbers seemed naturally to have colours: five is blue, two is green, three is red… And music has colours too: the key of C# minor is a sharp, tangy yellow, F major is a warm brown..."

—Stephanie Morgenstern interview[11]


  • Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899 – July 2, 1977), author. Grapheme → color.
In his autobiography, Speak Memory (1966), the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov tells us of his

"fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps 'hearing' is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) 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 bag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. 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. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh [Ш], a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation)."
" ... In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e's and i's, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by 'brassy with an olive sheen.' In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with 'Rose Quartz' in Maerz and Paul's Dictionary of Color. The word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow, is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv"

— From Vladimir Nabokov, p. 34-35. [12]

It should be mentioned that Nabokov's mother, Elena Ivanovna, was a synesthete, as was also his wife, Véra, and his son Dmitri Nabokov.


  • Joachim Raff (May 27, 1822 - June 24 or 25, 1882), composer. Timbre → color.
In 1855, the composer Joachim Raff "declared that the sounds of instruments produced color impressions of various kinds. Thus the sound of a flute produced the sensation of intense azure blue; of the hautboy [oboe], yellow; cornet, green; trumpet, scarlet; the French horn, purple; and the flageolet [bassoon], grey. The clearest and most distinct shades were those evoked by the high notes" (Krohn 1892 : 22). It is unknown whether Raff was a synaesthete; he may well have been, but this small set of colored timbres does not provide enough information, without more direct claims as to where the correspondences originate from.[13]


Rimsky-Korsakov synesthetically experienced colors for musical keys (musical keys →color). For example, for him, the key of C major was white, and the key of B major was a gloomy dark blue with a steel shine.[14]


  • Jean Sibelius (December 8, 1865 – September 20, 1957), composer. Sound → color.

"For him there existed a strange, mysterious connection between sound and color, between the most secret perceptions of the eye and ear. Everything he saw produced a corresponding impression on his ear – every impression of sound was transferred and fixed as color on the retina of his eye and thence to his memory. And this he thought as natural, with as good reason as those who did not possess this faculty called him crazy or affectedly original."
"For this reason he only spoke of this in the strictest confidence and under a pledge of silence. 'For otherwise they will make fun of me!'"

— From Karl Ekman, pp. 41-42. [15][16]


  • Daniel Tammet (born January 31, 1979), autistic savant. Grapheme → color/shape.
http://www.optimnem.co.uk/index.php.[17].


"Tenberken had impaired vision almost from birth, but was able to make out faces and landscapes until she was 12. As a child in Germany, she had a particular predilection for colours, and loved painting, and when she was no longer able to decipher shapes and forms she could still use colours to identify objects. Tenberken has, indeed an intense synaesthesia. "'As far back as I can remember,' she writes, 'numbers and words have instantly triggered colours in me ... number four, for example [is] gold. Five is light green. Nine is vermillion... Days of week, as well as months, have their colours, too.' Her synaesthesia has persisted and been intensified, it seems, by her blindness"

— From www.furtinecity.com. [18]


  • Michael Torke (born September 22, 1961), composer. Multiple synesthesiae.
This claim is supported by Torke's numerous interviews with major synesthesia researchers.[19]


  • Pharrell Williams (born April 5, 1973), hip-hop producer and artist. Music → color.

"It just always stuck out in my mind, and I could always see it. I don't know if that makes sense, but I could always visualize what I was hearing... Yeah, it was always like weird colors."

— From a Nightline interview with Pharell

[edit] Pseudo-synesthetes

[edit] Others proposed which are still under review:

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sound Generator Interview retrieved Aug. 26, 2006
  2. ^ Brown, Jeanell Wise. Amy Beach and her chamber music: biography, documents, style. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. P. 16. References are to letters in the Crawford Collection, Library of Congress.
  3. ^ Jenkins, Walter S. The remarkable Mrs. Beach, American composer. Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1994. Pp. 5-6. Reference is to an interview of Beach by George Y. Loveridge in the Providence (RI) Journal, Dec. 4, 1937, p. 5.
  4. ^ Ellington, as quoted in George, Don. 1981. Sweet man: The real Duke Ellington. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Page 226.
  5. ^ Feynman, Richard. 1988. What Do You Care What Other People Think? New York: Norton. P. 59.
  6. ^ see Cytowic, Richard E. 2002. Synaesthesia: a Union of the Senses. Second edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  7. ^ George, Don. 1981. Sweet man: The real Duke Ellington. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Pp. 225-226.
  8. ^ Ligeti, György. 1983 (1981). Ligeti in conversation. London: Eulenburg Books. Page 58.
  9. ^ Quoted from an anonymous article in the Neuen Berliner Musikzeitung (29 August, 1895); quoted in Mahling, Friedrich. 1926. "Das Problem der 'Audition colorée: Eine historische-kritische Untersuchung." Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie; LVII Band. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft M.B.H. Pp. 165-301. Page 230. Translation by Sean A. Day.
  10. ^ see Samuel, Claude. 1994 (1986). Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color. Conversations with Claude Samuel. Translated by E. Thomas Glasow. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press.
  11. ^ a b see Raskin, Richard. 2003. An interview with Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis on Remembrance. P.O.V., A Danish Journal of Film Studies; number 15 (March): 170-184.
  12. ^ Nabokov, Vladimir. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Putnam.
  13. ^ Krohn, W.O. 1892. “Pseudo-chromaesthesia, or The Association of Color with Words, Letters, and Sounds.” American Journal of Psychology; volume 5: 20-41.
  14. ^ This is according to an article in the Russian press, Yastrebtsev V. "On N.A.Rimsky-Korsakov's color sound- contemplation." Russkaya muzykalnaya gazeta, 1908, N 39-40, p. 842-845 (in Russian), cited by Bulat Galeyev (1999).
  15. ^ Adolf Paul (1890), En Bok om en Människa, as quoted in Ekman 1938: 41-42
  16. ^ Ekman, Karl. 1938. Jean Sibelius: His life and personality. Translated from the Finnish by Edward Birse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  17. ^ see Tammet, Daniel. 2006. "Born on a blue day." London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
  18. ^ see also Tenberken, Sabriye. 2003/2000. My path leads to Tibet. New York: Arcade Publishing.
  19. ^ see Duffy, Patricia Lynne. 2001. Blue cats and chartreuse kittens: how synesthetes color their worlds. New York: Henry Holt.
  20. ^ Dann, Kevin T. 1998. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
  21. ^ Dann, Kevin T. 1998. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
  22. ^ B. M. Galeyev and I. L. Vanechkina (August 2001). "Was Scriabin a Synesthete?". Leonardo; Vol. 34, Issue 4, pp. 357 - 362.
  23. ^ Scriabin, Alexander. 1995(1911). "Poem of Ecstasy" and "Prometheus: Poem of Fire". New York: Dover.
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