Ora Diamond

The senses; sound, touch, taste and smell — New born emerged to the world “drowned in senses”, cannot distinguish one sense from the other, one sense stimulates another (synesthesia), and confused with each other. Translation of perceptions by different human’s brain, as explained by psychologists, where people identify shapes with colours, sound with shapes, sound with colours and so on, and as defined “synesthesia… may be a memory of how early mammals saw, heard, smelled, tasted and touched”.

As it drives some people to distraction (confusion), so it might drive others away from distraction (creation). Some of the most famous synesthetes have been artists; composers, writers, politicians and artists with experience of synesthesia, such as the Symbolists that were influenced and loved it to the point where they could not get enough of it and went to drug use (LSD) to intensify their senses.

As long as one understands synesthesia (as clinical and medical fact) and walks with it in a controlled manner, it could be acceptable and used for the best for the use of arts and every day’s purpose, but once the synesthesia controls the individual, it could invade the border line (drugs and distraction).

Michelle (So-Yeon) Kim

Fantasia

• Synaesthesia means the stimulation of one sense, which rouses another sense. It is from the Greek word, syn "together" and aisthanesthia, “to perceive".
• Synaesthesia: the initial sensory stimulation is experienced physically; the second, equivalent perception occurs mentally.
• Everyone experiences some intermingling of the senses in daily life.
• A certain amount of synaesthesia is built into our senses. For example, people often relate low sounds with dark colors and high sounds with bright colors (colored-hearing)
• Neurologist Richard Cytowic stated synaesthetes as “living cognitive fossils” by tracing the limbic system of the brain. He indicated that “synaesthesia may be a memory of how early mammals saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched.” (p. 29)
• Although synaesthesia acts as distraction for some people, it has stimulated the creativity of others. (e.g. artists, composers who freely associated colors with music)
• During 18th century, synaesthesia was understood as drug hallucination.
• During 20th century, the idea of drug hallucination has fallen away from defining the synaesthesia, but redefined as genial natural that happens involuntarily.
• Symbolist movement: symbol from the Greek word symballein, “to throw together”
• Synaesthesia can be hereditary. (e.g., Nabokov's and his mother's experiences.)
• Alexander Scriabin created key-color scheme, which is particular human motion or state for each key. (e.g., C major indicates human will or ability to move forward, which is the color of red.)

Courting the Muse

• Creative artists are known for diving into their senses, using various ideas like synaesthesia. (e.g., Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin before she began her writing. The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples and inhale their strong scent when he needed to find the right word... etc.)
• Many non-pedestrian writers were inspired from their walking. (e.g., Wordsworth)
• Through “The Making of a Poem,” Stephen Spender stated “there is always a slight tendency of the body to sabotage the attention of the mind by providing some distraction. The concentrated effort of writing poetry is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body. A disturbance of the balance of the body and the mind and for this reason one needs a new kind of anchor of sensation with the physical world.” (p. 32)
• Numerous writers happen to be preoccupied on one specific type of music when they write a book. The music forms a mental frame around the essence of the book, re-creating the emotional landscape.
• In my opinion, synaesthesia does exist for everyone, but perhaps it is in definite personal form. Therefore, it would be difficult to neither analyze nor simplify the concept of synaesthesia.

Question: how would synaesthesia work as an incentive for you to create your art?

Nicole Seguin

Synaesthesia is when one sense stimulates another sense. Russian musician, Aleksandr Scriabin was a synesthetes. In Poems, with Colour, for Scriabin, by Elizabeth Gourlay, it talks about the life of Scriabin and associates colours with words how Scriabin associated colours with music.

Gourlay tells of how Scriabin studied music since he was a child. Scriabin used colours when writing instead of music notes. He would see colours, orange-rose, bluish white, green, purple-violet, and many others when he listened or was writing his music. For Scriabin music, sense of sound, stimulated colours, sense of sight. By bending key colours Scriabin was able to invent new chords.

Everyone experiences a certain amount of synaesthesia. Goethe and Rimbaud are also names that Gourlay mentions that associate one sense with another. Rimbaud associated vowel letters with colours, he seen the letter ‘A’ as black. Synaesthesia gives people, mainly artists, a unique vision of things.

Bibliography:

Gourlay, Elizabeth. “Poems, with Colour, for Scriabin.” In Colours for Scriabin:
New and Selected Poems. Vancouver: The Caitlin Press, 1990, pp.68-81.

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage, 1990,
pp.289-299. (Selection titled “Synaesthesia.”

“Alexander Scriabin.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 9 Oct. 2006. 12 Oct.
2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Scriabin>

Clarissa Steele

Synesthesia

• Brain disorder which results in the stimulation of one sense stimulating another
• very rare: occurs in only 1 out of 500 000 people
• exaggeration of the neural connections between the senses
• result of a cross between sensory information that occurs in the limbic system of the brain (most primitive part of the brain), when it is not completely controlled by the cortex
• Examples that people with disorder would encounter include hearing a musical note and sensing a smell, or touching a matte surface and seeing yellow

Gestalt Psychologists’ Experiment

• Psychologists asked people in the experiment to relate non-sense words to certain colours and shapes
• The results of this experiment showed that the people responded with sounds and shapes that fell into clear patterns

• Surprisingly, the results also displayed that people from all over the world answered with very similar patterns
• For example, many people often relate high sounds with bright colours and dark colours with low sounds.
• Therefore, as stated by the author, “A certain amount of synethesia is built into our senses” (29).

Inspiration for Creativity

Synethesia can cause people to be distracted. However, it can also take people away from their distraction. The author describes how “some of the most famous synesthetes have been artists” (29). Others use their knowledge of crossing sensory information to their advantage to inspire creativity. The author includes a large amount of examples to express how various artists look for inspiration.

Some of these examples include:

• Dame Edith Sitwell — lies in an open coffin before beginning to write
• Amy Lowell — smokes cigars while writing
• Dr. Samuel Johnson and W.H Auden — drank tea
• Colette — picked fleas off of her car
• Willa Carther — read the Bible

Amanda Stines

My personal interpretation of the reading entitled, "A Natural History of the Senses" is that artists as a whole, whether they be a musical artist or a writer, often tap deeply into their senses in order to find inspiration to create their art forms. For example, Ackerman describes that poet Schiller would keep rotten apples in his desk drawer and sniff the intense smell in order to discover the right word to use in his poetry (293). After this Ackerman shares a number of peculiar rituals performed by various artists such as Virginia Woolf, who would always stand while writing her novels (295) and Victor Hugo who would write in the nude because he felt that it was where he could create his best work (294). Later in the article, Ackerman mentions that T.S. Eliot's ritual of drinking large quantities of alcohol prior to writing enabled his thougths to flow freely (297). This point in my opinion perfectly explains part of the reason as to why these artists perform these strange rituals. For the artists these practices are what help them focus and find inspiration for the art form they are creating. These routines are what make the artist feel comfortable and relaxed, thus allowing them to let their natural thoughts come through.

Early in the article Ackerman describes what gives the artists these intense sensations that lead to their various rituals is the idea that they are synesthetes (290). Synesthetes are people who experience synesthesia (289) which can be described as, "The stimualtion of one sense stimulates another" (289). Ackerman provides an example of this from Gestalt psychologists (290), when describing that often people associate certain shapes or certain sounds with certain colours (290). It appears that the synesthesia that these artists experience can really help explain how they are able to create such intense, beautiful works. It is because they are able to delve so deeply into their own senses that they are able to relay these intense feelings into their own works.

Sanaz Taghizadegan

Synesthesia “is the stimulation of one sense stimulates another” (Ackerman, 1990) or when the senses correspond to one another. Our everyday experiences involve the mixture and intermingling of the senses. For example, people from various cultures are asked to associate colours to sounds. The survey reveals that many people associate low sounds with dark colours and high sounds with bright colours. This means that synesthesia does not rely on the geographical location of people and there are always different amounts of synesthesia in each person. (Ackerman, 1990)

• “Synesthesia can be hereditary” (Ackerman, 1990).

• One in every five hundred thousand people experience intense synesthesia. A neurologist, Richard Cytowič, links synesthesia to the most ancient part of the brain – the limbic system. He believes that “synesthesia… may be a memory of how early mammals saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched” (Ackerman, 1990).

• Synesthesia leads to creativeness. “Some of the most famous snesthetes have been artists” (Ackerman, 1990). For example, Composer Aleksandr Scraibin and Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov. Both composers associated colours with music as they wrote. For example, to Scraibin, an A major was a green colour.

• Most importantly, artists can manipulate their senses to do “remarkable tricks of synesthesia ” (Ackerman, 1990), such as:

What sparks a writer’s creativity?

Here are some examples from famous artists:

• Friedrich Schiller used to store rotten apples underneath his desk. He inhaled the smell when he wanted to trigger a word.

• Amy Lowell and George Sand continuously smoked cigars while writing.
• Dr. Samuel Johnson and W.H. Auden drank plenty of tea.
• Colette picked the fleas off her cat before she wrote.

• Many writers used opium (especially romantic writers) or drank alcohol before they wrote.

• Dame Edith Sitwell used to rest in an open coffin for a period of time before her she wrote.
• Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others wrote nude.
• Writers like Benjamin Franklin and Edmond Rostand wrote while soaking in the bathtub.

(Ackerman, 1990)

Some writers like to lie down and write, like Truman Capote who declares himself “a completely horizontal writer” (Ackerman, 1990). Other writers like to stand or write with their nose. Sometimes, writers depend on a particular type of music that becomes their muse or obsessively listen to one song. Furthermore, most poets get their inspiration from long walks. (Ackerman, 1990)

The author, Diane Ackerman, describes that it would be awkward to explain to one’s parent of how one’s sense stimulates. Rather, she says, “I think I’ll tell my parents that I stare at bouquets of rose before I work. Or, better, that I stare at them until butterflies appear” (Ackerman, 1990). Overall, the author reveals her muse is nothing compared to the other writers’, instead she creates her own muse, which consists of “a male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to [her] directly” (Ackerman, 1990). (Ackerman, 1990)

1. What is your muse or what sparks your creativity? Do you need to take long walks? (A muse is like an inspiration)

2. Can you link this reading of synesthesia to the field trip of the Music Garden? (Think about what Yo-Yo Ma and Julia Moir Messervy did)

Laura S. Wolfe

Synesthesia

Before discussing the article itself, it is pertinent to first provide some information about the author. Diane Ackerman is a poet from Illinois who received her M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. from Cornell University. She has had several anthologies of her poetry published as well as several works of non-fiction including A Natural History of the Senses which the article in question was taken from.

The article/essay titled Synesthesia is divided into two sections: “Fantasia” and “Courting the Muse”. Fantasia introduces the concept of synesthesia which is simply when the stimulation of one sense directly stimulates another. The examples given are people who related “certain sounds with certain colours in ways that fall into clear patterns.” This relation is more than merely a relation, it is a strong association that borders on and sometimes equates to experience.

It is first described as though it were a medical condition. “Those who experience intense syesthesia naturally on a regular basis are rare - only about one in every five hundred thousand people.” Apparently is has been attributed the limbic system. Those who can claim to have syesthesia are said to “have a memory of how early mammals saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched.”

Afterwards a number of references are made to various musicians and writers that need not be known about in detail. The main purpose of these references is to discuss the fact that they all experienced varied forms of synesthesia and it aided their artistic process. Which leads directly into the second section: Courting the Muse.

Courting the Muse is a discussion about how various artists — the majority being writers — obtain their inspiration. “Artists are notorious for stampeding their senses into duty, and they’ve sometimes used remarkable tricks of synesthesia.” It is supposed that “the goal of all these measures is concentration” and apparently the most popular methods are writing directly after sex, writing whilst lying down or standing up, taking long baths and writing over the edge of the tub, walking, listening to music which creates a desired mood, and the use of substances including but not limited to alcohol and opium. Some of the more unusual methods included lying in a coffin in the morning, picking fleas from a cat, writing with ones’ cat on one’s shoulder, having a head cold and writing in the nude. One author would not only be naked, but he would climb mulberry trees. Apparently it was the combination of his “fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his thoughts.” There were several others that cannot be mentioned in the space of a mere page.

The article is concluded with the author mentioning her own muses which are both creating and starting at bouquets of flowers, writing in the bath, and going speed walking for half an hour each day. A male muse that never speaks to her directly is also mentioned.

QUESTION: If you’re an artist, what is your muse? Why does this inspire you?

Janique Allen

• This text was written in the form of a series of poems, but told like a story.

• Gourlay autobiographically explains and tells the story of how she discovered Scriabin through an extensive piece that emanates her relation and understanding of Scriabin’s creativity. It starts with her witnessing the name Scriabin in the shape of an arc in the sky. With curiosity she asks a man who I assume is her husband if he has ever heard of him. Her husband then tells her that he was a Russian musician. Curiosity then overcomes her and she rushes to the library to learn more.

• Alexander Scriabin was a composer and one of the many artists who can be labeled as a synesthete because of his strong senses. He associates colour with music. Every note had its own individual colour. i.e. C major = red (Ackerman 299)

• Throughout the text Gourlay pays homage to Scriabin by constantly using descriptions of colour especially when she talks about mixing paints. The following are a few examples: “I notice chalk-white, the milk in your glass,”(Gourlay 68) “I carry my red mug of brown coffee into the library.”(Gourlay 70) You can see in those examples how easy it would have been to eliminate the colour words, but if they were gone the sentences would not have a significant purpose.

• It is peculiar how Gourlay describes the colours, i.e. September cherry leaves.

• In her research she then learns about Scriabin’s parents and their background in music and the arts, and she also learned that he grew up with music. Later on she discovers a picture of him and is displeased. All this time she has felt an imaginable connection with Scriabin but when she saw what he looked like her thoughts of him turned negative for a short while.

• An interesting comparison is made between Scriabin and an author named Goethe who also associates sound with colour. “They are like two rivers that have their source in the same mountain, but they flow, under different conditions, through totally different landscapes.”(Gourlay 77)

• Overall this piece was Gourlay’s own way of scripting the life of Scriabin by using a writing pattern that emphasized colour and sounds. This can be seen in its own way as a hybrid simply because it is drawing from so many different sources.

  1. What does Gourlay mean when she describes Scriabin’s “genius and madness” as “always this infinite narrow margin?

Laura Bonang

• The author herself is a poet, an author, and a painter, which almost didn’t even need to be researched because you can gather it from poem #3 very well.

• To her, everything is defined and described in terms of colour through all the poems. She states that “music isn’t her forte”, implying that she does not understand music because it very different from what she’s used to. This is ironic because Scriabin experienced music through colours, the same way she experienced things.

• Scriabin was a Russian musician/composer. It’s debated whether he actually had synesthesia, but he did relate colours to various musical keys.

This is an image of a “Scriabin Keyboard”, which shows the different colours he associated with particular notes. He composed his music accordingly.

(The above graphic was released online into the public domain by an anonymous contributor who stated “I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.” The graphic can be obtained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Scriabin_keyboard.png).

• The previous article (“Synesthesia” by Diane Ackerman) states that “Daily life is a constant onslaught on one’s perceptions, and everyone experiences some intermingling of the senses”, implying that even people who don’t have synesthesia have various sense-associations. I was unable to find anything to suggest that the poet had synesthesia, or even if the composer she was writing about had it.

• The author makes an interesting point in poem #21, when she describes how Scriabin “invented a new chord of superimposed fourths, by bending key colours.” She states it very matter-of-factly, when in reality it only makes sense in a synesthesist’s world.

• Question: Why might the author have become so preoccupied with finding out about Scriabin in the first place, knowing nothing about him? Also, why was it so important for her to tell us, through poems, about his life (childhood, marriages, etc.)?

Caitlin Chu

The content in the series of poems written by Elizabeth Gourlay covered a biography of Alexander Scriabin, a Russian composer and pianist who was synaesthetic. It was written as if Elizabeth Gourlay stood in the perspective of a synaesthete since she used a variety of colours as similes and metaphors and related one sense to another. It is her story about how she discovered Scriabin. Her poems also stimulate multiple senses of the audience, from smells to touch and sounds. Such as:

“Squeeze carefully the colours from
a tube of red
a tube of black
you will get purple, hue of September cherry leaves.”

(Vision, touch.)

The poem begins with the unfamiliarity the author has when she encounters the name “Scriabin,” using white vapour as a metaphor to his name. She asks her friend who sits next to her if she or he knows of Scriabin and the response is yes. He is a Russian musician, her friend says. Gourlay feels she has no connection to him at first, since she is a poet and a painter, not a musician. After this, she takes the readers to an operating room, where she compares the blood, particularly the way it “seeps” to the way one colour in the spectrum flows to another and how the stimulation of one sense leads to another, such as sound stimulating visual colour. Then she leaves for the library, where she decides to research about Scriabin.

After a lack of luck, she finally discovers The Oxford Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which reveals:

• Scriabin was born in Moscow, 1871
• Synaesthetes can spot colour in the darkest of places (like shadows)
• Scriabin is the son of Lubov Petrovna and Nicolai Scriabin — his mother was also a pianist
• Christened Alexander after being born
• Lubov Petrovna (Mother) caught a disease on her trip to Moscow and his father, Nicolai Scriabin, tried to take care of her, but “like a pale flower,” she passed away

Afterwards, his father gave his son to the care of his grandmother and Aunt. They raised him since a very young age and tried to give him all the best, especially piano lessons. At the age of six, he was able to play any song he heard once, making him a musical genius. Gourlay mentions that when she listens to the Preludes, she can see the sounds in “pastel hues.” Scriabin looked up to Chopin, and created original, lighthearted, and poetic songs.

Finally, Gourlay finds a book solely about Scriabin. She manages to find a photo of Scriabin’s face, describing him with “Fine hair, brushed off his forehead. Round eyes, an aloof expression. Beard and moustaches, curled and waxed, very prominent, like Dali’s.” Although she did not find him attractive, she discovered he was the same as her. He saw colours in notes and keys. She may be implying she is also a synaesthete.

Scriabin was also sent to the Moscow Military Academy when he was ten, but the reason was uncertain. (It may be his father insisted.) Even when he heard hooves beating on cobblestones, he saw colours like black and puce. Finally she is triggered into thinking about when she paints. Light and white can be broken down in a spectrum of colours and yet when she mixes two colours together she can make black. It makes her question what people say, that black is a shade that has no colour. She says some people can decipher rainbow colours in the dark, possibly a referral to synaesthetes.

She recalls Goethe, the author of Faust, who wrote that sound and colour should not be compared. They’re two completely different things, but like rivers, they come from the same mountain except they flow under different conditions and through different landscapes. For example, we see the lightning before we apprehend the thunder. Also, like painting, Scriabin invented new chords of fourths by “mixing” colours (bending key colours.) Everyone admired him, and he believed throughout his life he was meant to speak for humanity through his art. He had two wives, one for seven years (Vera Invanovna) who he had four children with. He eventually left her for Tatiana Feodorovna, whom he fell madly in love with for the rest of his life. She was also his pupil in music.

Among his greatest works were the Divine Poem and the Poem of Fire. He even created a keyboard that projected different colours onto a screen with each different key.

Before completing his best work, “The Mystery,” Alexander Scriabin passed away.

Question:

The next time you listen to music, hear a sound, or look at a visual, try to connect that experience to specific colours. What are the colours you seem to see? What sounds do you hear? What other associations do you make? Write them down.

Think about how synaesthetes have this occur to them naturally. That is an general sense of being synaesthetic.

Poonam Shahzadi

The writer of this poem, Elizabeth Gourlay is one who can be described as one with an artistic mind. Not only is she a Canadian writer but also a painter. I feel that her poem, “Poems, With Color, For Scriabin” is dedication to the life of Alexander Scriabin. The author was born around the same time surrealism was developed, in 1917 reflecting the dram like states in stanza one. This period was also known as the Scriabin century. Scriabin is someone whose name could have been mentioned in her early childhood and rested in the unconscious, in the back of her mind for decades. The poem develops, as she is naturally drawn closer and closer to discovering who Scriabin is and what he means to her. Elizabeth Gourley takes us through this self-discovering journey.

She discovers that Scriabin is a Russian musician. He was born in 1871 in Moscow Russia (SCRIABIN SOCEITY OF AMERICA). The author never knew what or who Scriabin was until she wrote the poem. She expresses a small fear of excitement of the unknown, as she gets closer to finding out that he is in, ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Music and Musicians’. Perhaps she already feels a connection and fears that she maybe related to him in a way she never knew.

“Suddenly I am afraid to read.
Why?
Frightened there will be no message.
Or that there will.” (COLORS OF SCRIABIN)

We travel with the author in discovering the meaning of Scriabin, his childhood to his adulthood and how that discovery allows her to become in content with her-self. The importance of Alexsender Scriabin is seen where in stanza one, Elizabeth Gourlay spells out Scriabin’s name in an arch shape, a moment capturing Scriabin as a representational figure for the flow of the rest of her poem. She clearly speaks to us about the day he is born, his mother who passed away and a father who abandoned his son to his spinster sister and family, to his piano lessons at Moscow Military Academy at the tender age of ten. The influences of Tanaef Arensky, Chopin, Liszt, and perhaps even Rimsky-Korsakov had had on Scriabin. The influences that Scriabin had left on others, and he ‘fueled psychoanalytic speculation on the distinction between talent and genius’ (WIKIPEDIA).

As the title of the poem, “POEMS, WITH COLOR, FOR SCRIABIN” suggests numerous references to colors is a dedication to the great mind of Alexander Scriabin, who in fact had synesthesia, “a condition wherein one experiences sensation in one sense in response to stimulus in another” (WIKIPEDIA). Scriabin’s talent and creativity had to do with his flow of thoughts, and the way his mind perceived music. His greatest works were recalled in the poem, like the, ‘Poem of Fire’, in which Scriabin used a color organ in his performance. Elizabeth Gourlay also speaks of, ‘The Mystery’, which was supposed to have been Scriabin’s masterpiece, a “Grand week long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas that was to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss” [WIKIPEDIA]. Scriabin never had an opportunity to complete this as he had passed away.

The use of color as a form of expression in the poem specifically highlights the change in author’s stages of mind as well. Near the end of the poem, stanza eighteen where she discovers everything there is to know about Scriabin she successfully plays with the mixture of colors. The continuous references to shapes, colors, the use of metaphoric language, and the form in which there is performance in the flowing of text on the page resembling water waves or lightning. Elizabeth Gourlay’s discovers who Scriabin is and how she is related to him.