Messiaen's Synaesthesia: The Correspondence between Color and Sound Structure in His Music

Bernard, Jonathan W.

doi:10.2307/40285351

Cited by 34 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…The co-occurrence of AP and synaesthesia has been described in case studies of typical persons, including professional musicians such as Messiaen (Bernard, 1986), Sarajev, Vanechkina (2001, and Scriabin (Mulvenna, 2007), as well as non-musicians (Carroll and Greenberg, 1961;Haack and Radocy, 1981;Hänggi et al, 2008). Synaesthesia has also been described in a person diagnosed with Asperger syndrome , in a person whose description is consistent with Asperger syndrome (Parker et al, 2006), and in the self-reports of autistic individuals (Cesaroni and Garber, 1991;O'Neill and Jones, 1997).…”

Section: Prevalence In Autism and Association With Savant Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 90%

Veridical mapping in the development of exceptional autistic abilities

Mottron¹,

Bouvet²,

Bonnel³

et al. 2013

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

206

162

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Superior perception, peaks of ability, and savant skills are often observed in the autistic phenotype. The enhanced perceptual functioning model (Mottron et al., 2006a) emphasizes the increased role and autonomy of perceptual information processing in autistic cognition. Autistic abilities also involve enhanced pattern detection, which may develop through veridical mapping across isomorphic perceptual and non-perceptual structures (Mottron et al., 2009). In this paper, we elaborate veridical mapping as a specific mechanism which can explain the higher incidence of savant abilities, as well as other related phenomena, in autism. We contend that savant abilities such as hyperlexia, but also absolute pitch and synaesthesia, involve similar neurocognitive components, share the same structure and developmental course, and represent related ways by which the perceptual brain deals with objective structures under different conditions. Plausibly, these apparently different phenomena develop through a veridical mapping mechanism whereby perceptual information is coupled with homological data drawn from within or across isomorphic structures. The atypical neural connectivity characteristic of autism is consistent with a developmental predisposition to veridical mapping and the resulting high prevalence of savant abilities, absolute pitch, and synaesthesia in autism.

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Section: Prevalence In Autism and Association With Savant Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 90%

Veridical mapping in the development of exceptional autistic abilities

Mottron¹,

Bouvet²,

Bonnel³

et al. 2013

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

206

162

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus, the fact that 440 Hz (as opposed to, say, 450 Hz) is denoted as 'A' is purely cultural whereas the fact that notes of 220 Hz, 880 Hz and 110 Hz are considered perceptually similar to 440 Hz is assumed to reflect an underlying property of auditory processing. For some synaesthetes, pitch class appears to be the strongest determinant of elicited colour (Bernard, 1986;Carroll and Greenberg, 1961;Haack and Radocy, 1981;Langfeld, 1914;Myers, 1915;Peacock, 1985;Riggs and Karwoski, 1934;Rogers, 1987;Vernon, 1930). Thus, all notes corresponding to the pitch class of 'A' would have the same colour in spite of differences in pitch height.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behaviour Management Problems as Predictors of Psychotropic Medication and Use of Psychiatric Services in Adults with Autism

Tsakanikos

Costello

Holt

et al. 2006

J Autism Dev Disord

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This study examines a group of synaesthetes who report colour sensations in response to music and other sounds. Experiment 1 shows that synaesthetes choose more precise colours and are more internally consistent in their choice of colours given a set of sounds of varying pitch, timbre and composition (single notes or dyads) relative to a group of controls. In spite of this difference, both controls and synaesthetes appear to use the same heuristics for matching between auditory and visual domains (e.g., pitch to lightness). We take this as evidence that synaesthesia may recruit some of the mechanisms used in normal cross-modal perception. Experiment 2 establishes that synaesthetic colours are automatically elicited insofar as they give rise to cross-modal Stroop interference. Experiment 3 uses a variant of the cross-modal Posner paradigm in which detection of a lateralised target is enhanced when combined with a non-informative but synaesthetically congruent sound-colour pairing. This suggests that synaesthesia uses the same (or an analogous) mechanism of exogenous cross-modal orienting as normal perception. Overall, the results support the conclusion that this form of synaesthesia recruits some of the same mechanisms used in normal cross-modal perception rather than using direct, privileged pathways between unimodal auditory and unimodal visual areas that are absent in most other adults.

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“…A number of composers have been described as having synaesthesia; for example, Marks (1975) suggested that Scriabin had synaesthesia and reported that the composer added a coloured dimension to live performances of his works. Other writers have pointed to the many synaesthetic statements made by Messiaen in describing his musical composition (Bernard, 1986). Since Galton's studies, compared with an appropriate baseline).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The physiology of coloured hearing A PET activation study of colour-word synaesthesia

Paulesu

Harrison

Baron‐Cohen

et al. 1995

Brain

189

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In a small proportion of the normal population, stimulation in one modality can lead to perceptual experience in another, a phenomenon known as synaesthesia. In the most common form of synaesthesia, hearing a word can result in the experience of colour. We have used the technique of PET, which detects brain activity as changes of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF), to study the physiology of colour-word synaesthesia in a group of six synaesthete women. During rCBF measurements synaesthetes and six controls were blindfolded and were presented with spoken words or pure tones. Auditory word, but not tone, stimulation triggered synaesthesia in synaesthetes. In both groups word stimulation compared with tone stimulation activated the classical language areas of the perisylvian regions. In synaesthetes, a number of additional visual associative areas, including the posterior inferior temporal cortex and the parieto-occipital junctions, were activated. The former has been implicated in the integration of colour with shape and in verbal tasks which require attention to visual features of objects to which words refer. Synaesthetes also showed activations in the right prefrontal cortex, insula and superior temporal gyrus. By contrast, no significant activity was detected in relatively lower visual areas, including areas V1, V2 and V4. These results suggest that colour-word synaesthesia may result from the activity of brain areas concerned with language and visual feature integration. In the case of colour-word synaesthesia, conscious visual experience appears to occur without activation of the primary visual cortex.

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Messiaen's Synaesthesia: The Correspondence between Color and Sound Structure in His Music

Cited by 34 publications

References 2 publications

Veridical mapping in the development of exceptional autistic abilities

Veridical mapping in the development of exceptional autistic abilities

Behaviour Management Problems as Predictors of Psychotropic Medication and Use of Psychiatric Services in Adults with Autism

The physiology of coloured hearing A PET activation study of colour-word synaesthesia

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