Life Across The Pond

Rachmaninoff in the Key of Periwinkle Blue

This morning, I was woken by a friend phoning to let me know she was returning my Netflix movies. So granted, I should have been up and getting ready for work already, but I wasn't. On the bright side though, since I was up, I caught a pretty interesting piece on NPR about synesthesia, a condition where one sense produces sensation of another.

In this story, the subject is a pianist who hears tones as colors. In other words, for her, a C evokes the color black in her mind while an F# evokes yellow-green. The interesting part comes when she explains how she couldn't figure out why certain color combinations didn't look right to her while they looked okay to everyone else until she realized that in her auditory color spectrum, these color combinations formed dissonant intervals.

This led me to think that perhaps there's a visual counterpart of a tone-deaf person. I suspect that I'm missing the ability to discern matching and clashing colors the way some people lack the ability to tell that they're singing off-key or out of tune. Sure, I know that red and blue match well (at least on a flag) and that brown shoes don't really go well with a black suit. However, rather than actually seeing that these colors match or don't match, I've really just memorized it as a rule. So potentially, today I might be wearing some combination of colors that makes other cringe sort of like how I cringe when I listen to someone sing a halfstep off-key at the karoake bar.

posted by Peter @ 1:49 PM