The Colour of Music
Synaesthesia, autism and me
“This is how the song looks in my head.”
I handed my mum a piece of paper with lots of brown blocks drawn on the left, and a big scribbled ball of multicoloured lines on the right.
“Explain it to me?”
“See, when the drums start I see these rectangles. The green lines are the violins and the synthesiser is purple.”
“Where do you see it?”
“In my head sometimes. Other times I see it outside of my head, sort of in my vision.”
My mother being slightly perplexed at me wasn’t an unusual occurrence. She smiled at me and went back to what she was doing.
I’ve always seen colours and shapes when I listen to music. It was most vivid as a child. As I’ve grown older the intensity has faded, but the sensation itself still remains.
My favourite songs invariably have the colours and shapes that I like the best. The song ‘As’ by Stevie Wonder is thoroughly purple, with shades of silver. His song ‘Pastime Paradise’ however, is full of thin green lines and brown circles.
I guess some of what I see correlates to the nature of the music. Staccato string sounds tend to look like small spiky lines, huge drum sounds feel fuller and more rounded, with darker colours towards navy blue, brown and black. Piano music looks like an array of dots, darker or lighter depending on their pitch.
When I got heavily into music as a teenager, becoming the Beach Boys autist I was destined to be, I would turn the lights off in my bedroom and experience the colours I could hear through my headphones. My own personal fireworks show. For me, nothing was better than listening to Pet Sounds, a whirl of greens and blues, with Brian Wilson’s unique voice soaring with shiny yellow stripes.
It does sound crazy, but it’s a real phenomenon. It’s called synaesthesia. The definition on Google describes synaesthesia as ‘when your brain routes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses, causing you to experience more than one sense simultaneously.’ You can have the version I experience, sound to colour, or many others, such as tasting words, or linking colours to letters.
According to the National Autistic Society, synaesthesia seems to be quite common among autistic people1. Interestingly, they report that ‘some autistic individuals experience ‘being touched’ by sounds, in other words, certain sounds are more felt than seen.’ I have experience of this. Sudden loud bangs make me feel like I have been punched in the chest, I feel physical pain. On the flip side, music that I enjoy makes me feel incredibly, like I’ve had a shot of vitamins. Moving to music - dancing, rocking, swaying, can feel euphoric to me.
Although anecdotally synesthesia seems common in the autistic population, it is still considered to be rare overall. The NAS notes that it may be underreported in autistic individuals because autistic children do not realise that other people do not see colour when they hear sound. I was one of those people. If I hadn’t mentioned to mum about how a song was ‘so brown’, I doubt I would have realised for a good while that not everyone sees colours and shapes when they listen to the radio.
Music is so special to me. The predictability of my favourite songs can calm me down in the aftermath of a shutdown. It takes the edge off a difficult day. It can inspire me, knowing that so many of my favourite artists are also neurodivergent (or blatantly neurodivergent without them realising). The firework display is a bonus. As the years go by, it is fading more and more, so I’m appreciating the colours left to see because they finally disappear.
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