Sunday 25 January 2004
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.
Thursday 1 November 2001
It’s finally sunk in.
Back on the first of January 2000, even with the rollover of the Great Year Odometer, the world didn’t seem any different.
“It’s a funny feeling,” I wrote then, “knowing that I and the rest of my relatives will bear a year starting with ‘2’ on their tombstones. You don’t usually think of your grandma being part of the 21st century - but she is, as much as you are…
“And it’s funny to think of that state of mind we had - I’m not sure when it’ll fully leave… the feeling that on the stroke of midnight, 31 Dec 1999, all the brick buildings in the world would turn to glass, all the cars would turn into airships, all the planes to rockets and the subways to maglevs…”
And again in 2001, it still didn’t feel like a new century.
Last night, we were at my grandmother’s place having dinner, and watched the first couple of innings of Game 3 of the World Series in New York City. And finally, it felt like The Future: George W. Bush throwing the first pitch - probably the longest minute in the entire lives of most of the security people there, the patriotic messages and memorials, the ads for United Airlines and gene-research firms, the jet flyovers…
I always used to mentally picture the decades as a series of impressions of colour and tone and shape, running from left to right, the synthesis of many visual memories of images and styles. For the 20th century, the years up to about 1930 were sepiatoned, then black and white and pale blue. The Thirties were deep wine red, the Forties black and white and deeper blue. The Fifties were sunny yellow and pink and white, the Sixties bright primary red and white, shading into psychedelic paisley purples and dark reds. The Seventies were pale yellow and off-white, then darkened to the sleek boxy black of consumer electronics in the early Eighties. Pastels and silvers and rough, chaotic textures followed in the Nineties.
In 2000 I wrote: “The 2000s were a blank slate, a great unknown. But I do remember it was white, shiny, gleaming, green, hopeful.
“Now I’d like it to be vast, multicoloured, joyous, rooted, honest, bright, rich.”
We’ll see…
