On synesthesia

People are familiar with synesthesia, but they don’t take them seriously; they may talk about them, but they do so in a derogatory manner. The idea of a note being soft is somehow incidental, an added fact, or maybe a relict or something indicating a specified origin. Do we really experience things in this manner, or does the derogatory manner of considering synesthesia have repercussions on experience? To talk of a soft note is an example of metaphorical speech. In this case an expression from one sensual domain, i.e. that of touch, is transferred to another, i.e. that of hearing. Actually fabrics are soft, and a note is either high or low, or perhaps loud or quiet, long or short. But wait a minute: in what respect is a note high or low? Aren’t high and low metaphorical expressions derived from the domain of space, so that, in fact, plains are low and mountains are high? In our conception of music, we are accustomed – primarily owing to the predominance of the piano – to conceiving of all imaginable notes in a row. This establishes an order, both from greater to lesser and an equality. But why do we call one direction of progressing in this order the direction toward the lower notes, and the other the direction to the higher? Couldn’t we reverse these concepts? “Im tiefen Keller sitz ich hier” we hear the bass voice sing – and it fits. Couldn’t it also sing “Im hohen Ausguck sitz ich hier”? And which register is suitable for “Hoch auf dem gelben Wagen”? A baritone would probably be best. High and low were supposed to be the characteristic terms representing the different notes. We recall that they are not “characteristic.” Are there, in fact, any predicates for the domain of music? And conversely: do the terms high and low really characterize the essence of the domain of music? Anyone with a humanist education will recall the mild shock at having to understand that the old Greek expressions for the order relationship in music, which we refer to as high and low, were called oxys and barys. What we call high was, in classical Greece, sharp (pointed) and what we call low was heavy (weighty) in their language. Did the Greeks experience music differently to us? And how did it come about that the two poles of divergent musical progression are given expressions which derive from completely different realms of experience? How can heavy and

sharp be, strictly speaking, the poles of an antinomy? Ordering the notes in accordance with the antinomies of heavy and sharp appears paradoxical at first sight. But once one accepts the idea, doesn’t it become plausible? Just imagine a muffled and massy note, weighty and voluminous, its energy concentrated toward the bottom, then imagine how it becomes concentrated, forcing its way upwards – upwards, it should be noted – and initially developing a powerful and then increasingly slender shaft, and in rising further toward the top gradually becoming sharper and more pointed, perhaps even diverging into a number of points. Couldn’t this image also represent the order of musical notation? Maybe it would be more adequate than a pure series running from high to low, in which the notes are not distinguished from one another in accordance with weight and character. Having performed these exercises, one will recall that our listening habits have changed as a result of modern music and, above all, modern recording techniques. When music was first reproduced technically by the gramophone record and radio, it was believed that it would be reduced to its pure structure, i.e. to melody and harmony. The other “channels,” the mellowness, the individual character of the instruments, the “spiritual” aspect of a voice and the atmosphere of a concert, would be lost through technical reproduction. Meanwhile we have learned that the opposite is the case. The emancipation of the musical avant-garde from any kind of system in music has considerably extended the musically significant qualities of the notes, or let us say in more general terms, their sounds. It is by no means a question of how high a note is, nor of the relevant duration and harmonic significance, but precisely its individual character and perhaps the buzz, the voluminousness, the spatial quality, the inner dynamics, and the indeterminability of its valence which are of interest to the artist. For the listener the fantastic perfection of acoustic techniques has made it possible to listen to music with a quality, i.e. a multidimensionality, that would have never been possible in a concert hall. The individuality of an instrument, the spatial development of a note, its mellowness, atmosphere, and sound are not musically relevant in spite of modern techniques but because of them. Never before has it been possible to hear the human voice in such purity, and so close, as it is now. A preliminary excursus into one of the sensual spheres, i.e. that of acoustics,

shows that the real relations may be precisely the opposite of that which our school knowledge or our common prejudices tell us. It does not appear to be at all certain whether this difference between the qualities, which is supposed to be classified under one sensual sphere, and the synesthesia somehow arising elsewhere, is really valid. For the person working in the field of aesthetics (aesthetic workers) this difference may never have existed.1 Aesthetic workers are here used to mean people who produce for human sensuality. This includes painters and decorators as well as interior designers, musicians, and the salespeople creating the atmosphere in a supermarket, cosmeticians as well as stage designers. For those working in these fields it has always been a question of the synesthetic effect on people’s moods. When an interior decorator lays a

sea-green carpet in a room, he is not concerned with producing walls with this color but with creating a spatial atmosphere. When a salesperson in a supermarket plays a certain type of music, he is not concerned with playing a specific work but with creating a mood conducive to promoting sales. Perhaps this is most striking in the ephemeral art of the stage designer. It is not works which are produced here but “scenes,” i.e. atmospherically charged spaces in which a drama can evolve. One could learn more about synesthesia from these aesthetic workers than from sensory physiology, psychology, or aesthetic theory. The theory generally takes as its point of departure the prejudice that there are five senses with specific sensual energies and specific sensual qualities, and only searches for so-called intermodal qualities or emotional effects of the sensual qualities when proceeding from this precondition. The reasons for this theoretical situation seem to me to lie in the fact that

the phenomena of human sensuality are not generally analyzed from the point of view of perception, but from that of their cause, the so-called stimuli. It may well be time to invert this relationship. Before any such attempt is made that great exception should be considered, that author from whom one can still learn a great deal about research into human sensuality: Goethe.