May (Will): Synaesthesia - I Can See Music

Will explains what it is like to have synaesthesia - a highly personal condition where different keys, notes and sounds appear as colours and shapes to the listener.

I’ve never thought of my relationship with music as unusual, at least not until I came across an article describing a phenomenon called synaesthesia. Reading it was one of those quietly startling moments where you realise that what you assumed was universal might actually be quite personal. Although I don’t read notated music - having grown up in the trad world - I still see it. For me, music has always had colour.

When I play or listen to music, I experience colours that correspond to what I’m hearing; a kaleidoscopic sixth sense. These colours aren’t fixed but shift depending on context, mood, and how deeply I’m concentrating.

Take musical keys, for example. F major has always felt warm to me: red or a deep, dark blue. But if I play something slow and soulful in F, the colour might soften or shift - to something greener or brighter. Genres tend to carry their own colour palettes too: gypsy jazz: red, warm, lively, but with a darker edge; 80s pop: lighter blues or yellows, bright; heavy metal: darker blacks and deep tones, though it can have flashes of brightness depending on the melody. Mood also plays a big role: if I’m relaxed and present, the colours tend to come through more clearly. If I’m anxious or overwhelmed, they can fade into the background or disappear entirely. In that sense, music behaves like my own sonic mood ring. 

The Stevens & Pound repertoire in general can be quite “colourful” because of how varied it is. In a piece like Jupiter, where the music unfolds over a long span, the colours are constantly shifting. The opening might sit somewhere between red and orange - bright but with a slightly darker edge - while later sections, especially the famous hymn-like material, feel simultaneously bright and heavy, harder to pin to a single colour. It’s not static; it evolves with the music. 

In performance I tend to notice the colours more than in rehearsal. By that point, the material is internalised, and I’m less occupied with technique. There’s more mental space to experience the music as a whole, including that visual layer. During slower pieces, the colours are particularly vivid, probably because there’s more mental capacity to process them. Fast, complex passages can crowd that out.

Where I do think synaesthesia becomes really useful is in composition. When I’m writing music, I often think in terms of colour and texture. I am always asking myself the question: “What colour do I want this to be?”. I might start with an idea like, “I want this to feel bright and yellow,” and then shape the melody and harmony to match that sensation. If I want something darker - say a deep green - I might move lower in pitch or adjust the harmonic structure. Octaves even have their own qualities; lower ones feel darker, higher ones brighter, violet.

One of the more interesting aspects of synaesthesia is that it works both ways. If I look at colours or visual patterns, I can translate them into sound. If you painted a line of different colours across a wall, I could compose a piece of music based on that sequence. It wouldn’t be fixed or repeatable in a scientific sense because my interpretation would depend on my mood at the time.

There is no single way to experience synaesthesia. Mine is quite specific to music, and even within that, it’s inconsistent and highly personal. For some people, it might be more intense or more stable. For me, it’s nuanced, changeable, and tied closely to emotion and mental state.

The musical word chromatic (describing every note of the scale) derives from the Greek word chroma meaning colour. Experiencing synaesthesia has made me more aware of the relationship between an interconnected sensory experience of the world and our emotions, and how music can become an extension of the self.

Will x