Where association stops and synaesthesia begins

Where does association stop and synaesthesia begin?

While listening to music, something often experienced in isolation (as with headphones on), it seems to me a natural reaction to imagine the video which should go with the song. When I saw American Beauty, I was very young, I don’t remember much more of the film than one scene in which a misfit boy is showing his girl a video he shot. There’s a polythene bag swirling around in a shifting whirlpool on the sidewalk. That’s all. That video was, for years, my definition of the ultimate in cinematography. It was like there was music coming out of it.

A few months ago, I had the good fortune of being able to watch the renowned Maria Pagés and her Flamenco troupe perform in New Delhi dance which was all at once of cobblestoned streets and the furnaces of hell. Maria Pagés dances to unfamiliar beats, I am a musician, but I could not keep time; the language is alien, I do not speak Spanish.
And yet as she danced, words were rushing out of my mouth; no, not words, formless ghosts burst out of me as if my soul would explode. The only form I knew to put them into was word. If I could recall what I thought (if you could call it that), faster than my own mind could process, at the time, I have no doubt that it would have produced some of the best I have ever written.

Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata always conjures up in my mind the image of afternoon sun coming in through a window. Nothing to do with moonlight at all, actually. I heard Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor for the first time recently, and that day I listened to it at least thirty times, again and again. To me it sounded like a man in a battered overcoat, in a grey scene, walking at times briskly, almost breaking into a run, and at times shuffling; always hugging himself tight, trying fruitlessly to keep the driving rain from running down his neck and onto his back. I asked my friend S, over the phone, to tell me what it looked like. “Looks like or sounds like?” he checked. But I knew what I meant. Anyhow, what he saw was totally different. It was a man arranging for a birthday party outdoors, in a garden. It’s strange to reconstruct what was described, phone conversations force one to colour them with one’s own perception. But there were sepia flashbacks in his picture. The music lends itself to flashback, going distinctly from minor sounds to major sounds and back. S saw it as a filmmaker would, a structured and bounded view. I saw it as a torturous road; I was like the wildlife cameraman, following my fellow, not knowing what he would see next. He saw children playing. He saw destitution. He saw despair. He saw survivors. But overall the scene was never released from the grey downpour.

Even the distinctions between minor and major chords or scales seems to be questionable. I can certainly feel the sadness of minor notes, but I really wonder what the average non-musical person hears and feels. I tried this with my roommate last year, she has no particular musical inclination except the intermittent interest that all teenagers must have. I played her Romanza on the piano (electric keyboard, actually) and asked her if she could see where the mood changed. She could, it’s a good piece to start out with, very easy to pinpoint the changes (I don’t know if these are what are called movements). Even so, a hundred per cent statistic on a one person test is not exactly a fair sample. I was not convinced.

I really don’t know where normal associations end and synaesthetic ones begin; isn’t, say, BLUE=COLD or RED=HOT? Or are even these associations culture-specific? When you’re decorating a room, you are advised to choose colour schemes wisely, appropriate to the feel of the room. You wouldn’t paint a nursery red, would you?

You feel happy when you see/hear something, sad when something else. But wait, that’s not a synthesis of senses at all. I can’t figure this out, though. Is seeing in the mind’s eye seeing?

Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. Is it all in my head? Does synaesthesia even exist? Or is it because I have never felt the real thing that I am a sceptic?

It’s tough being a sceptic and also being creative and a romantic. And considering that every synaesthete’s experience may differ vastly in strength and nature from the next, it makes it even harder to explain.

Great. One more to add to the identity crises.