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Related Experiment Videos

Synaesthesia for reading and playing musical notes.

Jamie Ward1, Elias Tsakanikos, Alice Bray

  • 1Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK. jamie.ward@ucl.ac.uk

Neurocase
|March 7, 2006
PubMed
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This study reveals synaesthesia in musical notation, where colors are perceived with notes. Synaesthetic colors impact music playing but not simple color naming, suggesting meaning-based processing.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Sensory Perception

Background:

  • Synaesthesia is a neurological condition where stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.
  • Previous research has documented synaesthesia for graphemes (letters/numbers) and sounds, but not extensively for musical notation.

Observation:

  • Three individuals with synaesthesia reported experiencing colors in response to written musical notation, graphemes, and heard music.
  • These synaesthetes exhibited Stroop-like interference when naming the color of graphemes, but not for written musical notes in a simple naming task.
  • Deeper processing tasks involving musical notation, such as playing music from colored notation or naming synaesthetic colors while suppressing veridical colors, reliably elicited interference.

Findings:

Related Experiment Videos

  • This study provides the first empirical evidence of synaesthesia specifically for musical notation.
  • The findings indicate that synaesthetic color influences sensory-motor transformations (music playing/reading) but not direct verbal color naming.
  • This suggests that synaesthetic Stroop effects can stem from processing the meaning of a stimulus, not solely from verbal response interference.

Implications:

  • Synaesthetic associations for musical notation appear to originate from grapheme color synaesthesia, suggesting a migration of associations between representational formats.
  • The results challenge existing models of synaesthesia by demonstrating that interference effects can arise from semantic processing.
  • This research opens new avenues for understanding the neural mechanisms and developmental origins of synaesthetic experiences, particularly in complex symbolic systems like music.