Music-colour synaesthesia: Concept, context and qualia

Acoustic features of instrumental movie soundtracks elicit distinct and mostly non-overlapping extra-musical meanings in the mind of the listener

Music can evoke powerful emotions in listeners. However, the role that instrumental music (music without any vocal part) plays in conveying extra-musical meaning, above and beyond emotions, is still a debated question. We conducted a study wherein participants (N = 121) listened to twenty 15-second-long excerpts of polyphonic instrumental soundtrack music and reported (i) perceived emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness) as well as (ii) movie scene properties imagined during listening (e.g., scene brightness, character role). We systematically investigated how acoustic features of instrumental soundtrack excerpts (e.g., tempo, loudness) contributed to mental imagery of movie scenes. We show distinct and mostly non-overlapping contributions of acoustic features to the imagination of properties of movie scene settings, characters, actions, and objects. Moreover, we find that negatively-valenced emotions fully mediate the relation between a subset of acoustic features and movie scene properties, providing evidence for the importance of emotional valence in evoking mental imagery. The data demonstrate the capacity of music to convey extra-musical semantic information through audition.

Sensory translation between audition and vision

Across the millennia, and across a range of disciplines, there has been a widespread desire to connect, or translate between, the senses in a manner that is meaningful, rather than arbitrary. Early examples were often inspired by the vivid, yet mostly idiosyncratic, crossmodal matches expressed by synaesthetes, often exploited for aesthetic purposes by writers, artists, and composers. A separate approach comes from those academic commentators who have attempted to translate between structurally similar dimensions of perceptual experience (such as pitch and colour). However, neither approach has succeeded in delivering consensually agreed crossmodal matches. As such, an alternative approach to sensory translation is needed. In this narrative historical review, focusing on the translation between audition and vision, we attempt to shed light on the topic by addressing the following three questions: (1) How is the topic of sensory translation related to synaesthesia, multisensory integration, and crossmodal associations? (2) Are there common processing mechanisms across the senses that can help to guarantee the success of sensory translation, or, rather, is mapping among the senses mediated by allegedly universal (e.g., amodal) stimulus dimensions? (3) Is the term 'translation' in the context of cross-sensory mappings used metaphorically or literally? Given the general mechanisms and concepts discussed throughout the review, the answers we come to regarding the nature of audio-visual translation are likely to apply to the translation between other perhaps less-frequently studied modality pairings as well.

Action, emotion, and music-colour synaesthesia: an examination of sensorimotor and emotional responses in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes

Synaesthesia has been conceptualised as a joining of sensory experiences. Taking a holistic, embodied perspective, we investigate in this paper the role of action and emotion, testing hypotheses related to (1) changes to action-related qualities of a musical stimulus affect the resulting synaesthetic experience; (2) a comparable relationship exists between music, sensorimotor and emotional responses in synaesthetes and the general population; and (3) sensorimotor responses are more strongly associated with synaesthesia than emotion. 29 synaesthetes and 33 non-synaesthetes listened to 12 musical excerpts performed on a musical instrument they had first-hand experience playing, an instrument never played before, and a deadpan performance generated by notation software, i.e., a performance without expression. They evaluated the intensity of their experience of the music using a list of dimensions that relate to sensorimotor, emotional or synaesthetic sensations. Results demonstrated that the intensity of listeners' responses was most strongly influenced by whether or not music is performed by a human, more so than familiarity with a particular instrument. Furthermore, our findings reveal a shared relationship between emotional and sensorimotor responses among both synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. Yet it was sensorimotor intensity that was shown to be fundamentally associated with the intensity of the synaesthetic response. Overall, the research argues for, and gives first evidence of a key role of action in shaping the experiences of music-colour synaesthesia.

Eggs, sugar, grated bones: colour-based food preferences in autism, eating disorders, and beyond

In 1913, eccentric French composer Erik Satie wrote a fragmentary, diary-like essay where he depicted a strikingly rigid diet consisting solely of white foods: eggs, sugar, coconuts, rice, cream cheese, fuchsia juice and so on. Satie's brief essay has later been used as one of many puzzle pieces in attempts to retrospectively diagnose him with autism spectrum disorder. With Satie's white meal as a starting point, this paper explores colour-based food preferences and selective eating in clinical and non-clinical populations, with a special focus on autism spectrum disorder and avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). General colour preferences and their causes as well as the impact of colour on taste and food identification are also explored. Selective eating during childhood is immensely common and does not generally lead to disordered eating in the long run, although subgroups may experience rigidity around food of a more enduring nature. Problems related to eating were repeatedly described in Kanner's original 1943 autism case series and continue to be common in autism. Most studies on eating and sensory sensitivity in autism show that the texture and consistency of the food are the most common factors behind selective eating. In contrast, colour-based food preferences appear to be relatively rare, although numerous anecdotal reports exist. Foods that are white or colourless may be particularly appealing or tolerable for individuals with sensory hypersensitivity, which can occur in autism or ARFID. Ultimately, in the case of Erik Satie, this paper concludes that his description of a strictly white diet should not be read as an autobiographical account but rather as an ironic take on contemporary symbolist literature, with the famously decadent all-black dinner party in French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans' À Rebours (1884; also known as Against Nature) as an obvious source of inspiration.

Strategies Used by Musicians to Identify Notes' Pitch: Cognitive Bricks and Mental Representations

To this day, the study of the substratum of thought and its implied mechanisms is rarely directly addressed. Nowadays, systemic approaches based on introspective methodologies are no longer fashionable and are often overlooked or ignored. Most frequently, reductionist approaches are followed for deciphering the neuronal circuits functionally associated with cognitive processes. However, we argue that systemic studies of individual thought may still contribute to a useful and complementary description of the multimodal nature of perception, because they can take into account individual diversity while still identifying the common features of perceptual processes. We propose to address this question by looking at one possible task for recognition of a "signifying sound", as an example of conceptual grasping of a perceptual response. By adopting a mixed approach combining qualitative analyses of interviews based on introspection with quantitative statistical analyses carried out on the resulting categorization, this study describes a variety of mental strategies used by musicians to identify notes' pitch. Sixty-seven musicians (music students and professionals) were interviewed, revealing that musicians utilize intermediate steps during note identification by selecting or activating cognitive bricks that help construct and reach the correct decision. We named these elements "mental anchorpoints" (MA). Although the anchorpoints are not universal, and differ between individuals, they can be grouped into categories related to three main sensory modalities - auditory, visual and kinesthetic. Such categorization enabled us to characterize the mental representations (MR) that allow musicians to name notes in relationship to eleven basic typologies of anchorpoints. We propose a conceptual framework which summarizes the process of note identification in five steps, starting from sensory detection and ending with the verbalization of the note pitch, passing through the pivotal role of MAs and MRs. We found that musicians use multiple strategies and select individual combinations of MAs belonging to these three different sensory modalities, both in isolation and in combination.

Crossmodal Correspondences in the Sounds of Chinese Instruments

People tend to associate stimuli from different sensory modalities, a phenomenon known as crossmodal correspondences. We conducted two experiments to investigate how Chinese participants associated musical notes produced by four types of Chinese instruments (bowed strings, plucked strings, winds, and percussion instruments) with different colors, taste terms, and fabric textures. Specifically, the participants were asked to select a sound to match each color patch or taste term in Experiment 1 and to match the experience of touching each fabric in Experiment 2. The results demonstrated some associations between pitch and color, taste term, or the smoothness of fabrics. Moreover, certain types of Chinese instruments were preferentially chosen to match some of the colors, taste terms, and the texture of certain fabrics. These findings therefore provided insights about the perception of Chinese music and shed light on how to apply the multisensory features of sounds to enhance the composition, performance, and appreciation of music.

Volatility and fluctuations in preferences for Red, Yellow and Blue colours are indicators of personality traits and biological status

Response to colour is an outcome of complex interactions between retinal neurophysiology and light. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that the sequence of preferences for the three primary colours Red, Yellow and Blue could provide cues to the personality of an individual. The sequence of preferences will harbour hidden patterns or algorithms that are linked to personality traits. The fluctuations or volatility observed in these preferences carefully recorded over a large number of observations will throw up interesting patterns that can be linked to personality traits. The data from a number of subjects will be used to identify similarities in colour preference patterns that match with personality types that have been determined using standardised tools for identifying personality types. The protocols to be followed for testing the hypothesis have been detailed. Statistical analyses of the data sets are suggested. The subjects that will be studied will hopefully be a source of data that will lead to unveiling the complexities of various personality types and personality traits. It will not be out of place to assume that the data generated can be extrapolated to read the biological and physiological conditions also.

Senomic view of the cell: Senome versus Genome

In the legacy of Thomas Henry Huxley, and his 'epigenetic' philosophy of biology, cells are proposed to represent a trinity of three memory-storing media: Senome, Epigenome, and Genome that together comprise a cell-wide informational architecture. Our current preferential focus on the Genome needs to be complemented by a similar focus on the Epigenome and a here proposed Senome, representing the sum of all the sensory experiences of the cognitive cell and its sensing apparatus. Only then will biology be in a position to embrace the whole complexity of the eukaryotic cell, understanding its true nature which allows the communicative assembly of cells in the form of sentient multicellular organisms.