Painting with Words? by Neil McGowan

 

People who’ve read previous posts of mine will know I have a deep love of music, primarily classical but other genres as well. It forms a permanent soundtrack to my life, and provides a palette of colours as a background.

See, I have synaesthesia. I ‘see’ colours when I hear music (well, all sound, really, but music is much more overt). It’s not something I’ve spent much about – I was in my twenties before I realised it wasn’t the normal state of being for people, and that it had a specific name. All I knew up to then was it was easy to tell when my guitar was in tune as each open string was a specific colour.

I say I ‘see’ the colours, but that’s probably a simplification. It’s not the same as seeing something visually, as closing my eyes makes no difference – I still get the same images as I do with eyes open.

It was earlier this year, when the BBC Proms were on, when my wife discovered that when I talked about the different colours of the music, I was being literal, rather than metaphorical. She’d never heard of synaesthesia before, and was intrigued by the concept (and amused – I was telling her the story of the synaesthetic composers arguing that Wagner set the ‘Fire’ music from the end of Die Walkure in the wrong key, as the colours were all wrong; she found the whole concept, as she put it, ‘totally bonkers’.)

As an interesting aside, I have a recent recording of Die Walkure, and an archive recording (from 1935) and I can tell the difference instantly due to the slight change in concert pitch between the two.

But it got me thinking about it, and I discovered that synaesthesia comes in many guises, and the form I have is the most common. What was most surprising was discovering one of the trainers in my team at work (who shares an office with me) also has synaesthesia, but experiences it differently.

She still sees colours, but not when she hears music; no, she sees the colours when reading! (She’s also Russian by birth, and apparently the colours differ depending on which language she’s reading.) That was the point I really understood what my wife was saying about it being odd.

It got me thinking, though, about how we aim to create certain pictures and evince particular emotions when we write.

She was good enough to humour me with some (extremely unscientific) experiments - wrote a short piece in my usual style, and then rewrote it in a slightly different way, trying to keep as much of the original text as possible, and just substituting what I thought were the key words or phrases. It was only a couple of hundred words, so relatively easy to do, and I thought both pieces were about the same level – not too shabby, but would need further work to polish them up.

However, she said there were significant differences in them, in terms of how they made her feel – for example, I substituted ‘jogged’ for ‘sprinted’, and that changed the meaning of the whole phrase for her. How much of this is due to the synaesthesia, and how much is down to the differing word choice, I don’t know. I also wonder if it’s more overt with poetry, as that’s much more reliant on word choice in terms of creating mood and atmosphere.

Fascinating stuff, though. All that remains now is to work out how to weave it into a story...