It’s time to stop scoffing at the synesthetes: linking music to colors is totally normal. It’s not really about the notes, though. Researchers say the colors we find in music are actually the colors of the emotions the music makes us feel.
Synesthetes are people whose sensory experiences overlap; they most often link letters or numbers to certain colors. Music-color synesthesia, in which hearing music triggers the colors, is rarer. In fact, when Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to do a pilot study of music-color synesthetes, they couldn’t find any. So instead they began looking at the connections between music and colors in everybody else.
As part of a larger study called the Berkeley Color Project, Palmer and Schloss included questions about music. Participants saw a grid of colors while listening to 18 brief clips of classical pieces, and chose the colors ...
