#chris talking about his synaesthesia

[charlie-rulerofhell]

Chris talking about his synaesthesia and seeing the colour of music

a snippet of an interview Chris did with a German ESC channel about a month ago, translated from German into English (because I thought it was pretty fascinating what Chris had to say, and hoped you all would enjoy reading about it as well)

Benny: Chris, you are a synaesthete. What does Blood and Glitter look like to you? And is there a Eurovision song that looks particularly noticable?

Chris: So, you know … Synaesthesia is the connection of senses that normally do not belong together, right? Someone who can taste colours, for example. So they are seeing a colour and are having a certain taste in their mouth. In my case it's the ear that is connected to the eye, and it only works in this direction. So when I'm hearing a certain note, I see a specific colour.

You can picture it like an instagram filter, when everything gets colourised in a certain way, and all contours seem to be glowing in that colour. A little bit like a real-time light show. I'm pretty good at repressing it, though, and it also doesn't happen when I'm tired and the brain is trying to save resources. But when I allow it to happen then I'm seeing this aura. It has nothing to do with how a song feels to me, though, so the colour is not determined by the feeling that I have. It's really just a physical thing. Sounds are wave lengths. So you have twelve semitones, and then everything repeats itself, twice as high, twice as deep, and so on. So these wave lengths are all connected to a certain colour. C, for example, always has a blue shade to me, and when it goes deeper, to an A, it becomes purple. So, Blood and Glitter is written in A minor, and especially with the guitar riff in the beginning, everything gets stained in a purple tone. So it's not blood and gold at all, if we would consider gold to be a proper colour.

Now the thing is, it's important to me that our lightshow matches the colours that I'm seeing, and I can work quite well with red and purple. If it's too complementary, like red and green for example, that doesn't work well for me. Or if a song goes too far into the direction of green, then I'm having trouble handling it, unless the song symbolises a certain inner conflict, because I simply don't like green as a light colour. Even though I quite like it as the colour of the forest, where it is more muted.

It's getting pretty nerdy here, as you may notice. So the thing is that the clearer the information is, the more distinct will be the colour that I'm seeing. When I'm hearing simply a pure sinusoidal tone, then the colour is very clear. When more harmonies come together, everything will get muddier. Like when you mix all colours together and it becomes brown – or white when you're mixing light. That's also one of the reasons why I rarely like jazz when it becomes too atonal. Because with all those different sevenths and ninths in jazz chords you have a lot of friction, and then it just becomes very muddy and cold colour-wise, like there's no clear colour information anymore, and it's all just grey. So I cannot really feel jazz emotionally. Or when you have a song with a lot of harmonies and transpositions, then it can also change during one song.

But with the other Eurovision songs I haven't really paid any attention to their colours yet, because it is something that is so normal to me that I'm not analysing it really. I won't be thinking: Oh, it's getting blue now! It's just as normal to me as when you open your mouth and there is sound coming out of it, I also wouldn't be paying any attention to that.

Peter: What about classical music?

Chris: Well, when you're talking about the proper classical period here – also including the Romantic, the neoclassical or the baroque era, so everything that is harmoniously precise, and which works diatonically in major and minor keys – here it is quite similar to pop music, it's very comprehensible. When it gets too modern however, like the Schoenberg school, twelve-tone technique, all that, or the whole expressionism, then it's just like jazz with classical instruments, so that also doesn't work for me. Because then the colours are just jarring, you know? It's not only weird for the ear, it's also hurting the eye. But I do love classical music. I listen to a lot of classical music, I love movie scores, the cello was my first instrument, and I'm still playing it. I have basically made classical music before I even knew that something like pop music existed.

Benny: What a fascinating topic, really! We could probably fill a whole show with that if we wanted. Thank you for the answer.

Chris: Oh, sorry, if I may nerd around some more, just one thing. When I'm listening to a certain symphony or whatever, and I feel like the colour-mood does not match what I'm hearing, then I have this here in the whole house [takes a remote control] … all the light bulbs are connected with this Philips hue system, so whatever lamp I need to change, I can adjust it, until I feel like this matches the music that I'm currently listening to better.

Benny: So today the mood goes more into the direction of pink?

Chris: For me it's red, maybe the screen messes it up. But that was really just because of Blood and Glitter, that made me go: Let's do a red light show today.