Forgery League

These are the colours I associate with various notes. Not the actual notes, actually, but just their names in the Western system. Some of the colour-associations are stronger than others (purple for G, for example, is pretty weak, but A is definitely red). I’m not sure where they come from - there’s a definite spectrum-order to them, which might have come from a toy instrument, for example, or a piece of software.

Peggy asked: Hm. Is this synaesthesia (mild or strong), or just… an association?
The gradients on D#/Eb and F are interesting, too. Peeling paint or stickers? I can easily see a little toy piano of two or three octaves, with bright plastic keys, or partially-worn stickers in rainbow colors, a few missing by the time it ends up in your young hands…

I don’t think these are really synaesthesia in a classical sense… there’s no connection to sound at all, just to the note names. However, letters in general do tend to have colours for me (or feelings, at least, though they’re too subtle and transient to be called tactile). They feel(?) similar to the visuals(?) I get when thinking about different eras (see earlier entry).

I had an interesting conversation about learning with an acquaintance whose daughter was having trouble in math - she was an ace at reading and writing, but numbers meant nothing to her. They had no feelings associated with them, whereas the stuff she was reading in English had all sorts of feelings.

By contrast, I think it’s because I do have these subtle sensations connected to numbers that I took to math so easily. (Even numbers feel squarish, like Lego; compound numbers stack in rows according to their factors, and often share some traits with their factors. 65 is kind of dark reddish, like 13, and also round in the same way all multiples of 5 are.)

The gradients are mostly to reflect ambivalence or a weak association. F and F#, although I understand them well, don’t have strong colours.