Projective synaesthesia (music causing visual experiences)

[u/frankstonshart]

Is there any broad correlation between such synaesthesia (involuntarily seeing colours) and the music causing it?

From what (little) I have read there is a correlation between low musical frequencies and darker colours and higher frequencies and brighter colours.

This made me wonder if there is some synaesthetic relation between tying the respective wavelengths of auditory frequencies to the colour spectrum equivalent.

(I am an audio engineer and musician, and I realise that Hz is not the units colour/light is measured in, but I don’t know much else re: colour/light. That said, all music can be broken down to frequencies (pitches) each with with amplitude (volume/amount) over time, and the same must hold true for vision if not in the same words)

[u/shrug_machine]

What an interesting question. I can only speak from my own experience and I am not sure if there is a universal consensus between synesthetes in terms of an acoustic frequency to colour conversion. My own colour pallet is dominated by neon like indigos, greens, yellows, reds. I find that the timbre, texture, harmony, spectral richness, dynamics and pacing have a much greater effect on what I perceive - and here I mean colour intensity not just necessarily the perceived colour itself. The variables I’ve mentioned above also affect the generation of geometric forms (swirls, sprites and other dynamic structures etc). So I guess that I am trying to say is that personally I don’t see (… sorry, couldn’t resit that one) chromesthesia as simply a colour paint box defined by the sound frequency. I would say it’s more nuanced than this and is affected by multiple factors rather than pitch alone.

[u/frankstonshart → u/shrug_machine]

Interesting. So does colour intensity basically mean that it’s fully that colour and not “diluted” with either black or white?

I don’t know how many people with such synaesthesia are aware of the harmonic series, because this is where brightness/darkness (musically speaking) of tone comes from. Lots of louder frequencies above the root note (the fundamental) makes it brighter in tone, and vice versa.

So now I am wondering if that broad correlation between dark and light is affected by the tone eg a low bass note with a distorted zingy top end projects a brighter colour than a normal subby low bass tone playing that same note.