Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, Thames & Hudson

"Visual Music traces an alternate history of abstract art of the past century... In effect, the idea of synaesthesia served to mediate between music and visual art in the early twentieth century and proved essential to the development of abstraction. Emphasising the perceiving subject, the theory of synaesthesia tended to break down sense perception into discrete units, whereby one sensation found its equivalent in another; music, with its notes and phrases, harmony and dissonance, compositional structures and abstract notational system, lent itself most readily to such analogy" (Page 16)

Synchromism - An art movement founded in the early 1900's by Macdonald-Wright and Russell analogising colour to music.

"Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of colours can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul"
"Such highly sensitive people are like good, much-played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibres at every touch of the bow. If one accepts this explanation, then admittedly sight must not be related to taste, but to all the other senses. Many colours have an uneven, prickly appearance, while others feel smooth, like velvet... Finally our hearing of colours is so precise that it would perhaps be impossible to find anyone who would try to represent his impression of bright yellow by means of the bottom register of the piano"

Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 160, 158-159

• For Kandinsky, the artistic coming together of the senses in this way was a kind of spiritual experience.
• For Kandinsky, an art based upon multi sensory aesthetic experience promised spiritual redemption

(Left) from artist Marsden Hartley, portrays a musical theme, (Oriental Symphony).

(Right) from artist Man Ray, an ambitious oil painting providing a visual representation of a symphonic orchestra.

Georgia O'Keefe's Music - Pink and Blue II, 1919. O'Keefe was not a synaesthete but consciously attempted to translate music into art.

The image above shows how different interpretations of musical scales have been made in terms of colour over three centuries. The people above have tried to create an analogy of colour and sound, each mapping them together differently, even going as far as to compare hues to musical pitch.

Other Research



Synaesthesia brought to the big screen - Disney's Fantasia

Note: Research German Scientist Wilhelm Wundt, who conducted systematic studies of synaesthetic perception.