© Copyright 2004 Jeanne Shannon
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The telephone rang…a shimmering yellow sound coming out of the instrument in long spurts. The door chimes clanged, a bronze-gold sound, yet shadowy. The typewriter clicked and clacked, gray staccato. My aunt called my name in her rust-colored voice. "Jeanne," she said, and I saw my name as if it were printed in pale green letters. Her name, Sara, was a soft rose shadowed in blue. I was twelve, and I assumed everyone saw sounds in color, just as I did.

I learned otherwise when I was in my twenties and working in an office. I described a coworker's name as "salmon pink," and saw expressions of bewilderment all around me. To assure themselves that I hadn't suddenly "flipped out," my coworkers started asking me what I meant when I said "Elliott" is salmon pink. When I told them it was because the letter "l" is that color, it didn't help their understanding at all. Slowly it dawned on me that they had no point of reference to start from; they couldn't imagine that a sound had color.

It was many years later that I learned my special sensory perception has a name: synesthesia. It is defined as "a phenomenon in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as the hearing of a sound resulting in the sensation of the visualization of a color." Among the most commonplace of synesthetic perceptions are the well-known connections between color and thermal sensations: Yellow, orange, and red are frequently thought of as "warm" colors, while blue and green are "cool." Colored hearing and colored taste are much more dramatic, apparently idiosyncratic, manifestations of synesthesia.

When I began to discuss my experience of synesthesia with other people, I met some who, while they did not necessarily have colored hearing, had other kinds of synesthetic perceptions. For example, one woman perceived the taste of beef as purple. Another associates textures and objects with sounds—the H, for her, evokes an image of rusty nails. 

My own experience is that since earliest memory, sounds and words have been colored, and their colors have never changed. "Karen" remains "the green of avocados under water," as I described it in a poem, and "Phyllis" and "Sylvia" are somewhere between peach and pink.

When I learned the alphabet, I saw each letter written in its color. A was the bluish white of skimmed milk, and B, C, D, E, G, H, J, K, P, T, V, X and Z were also off-white mixed with gray or blue. F was a reddish tan, and I was a very dark gray, almost black. M was gold, N lemon yellow, O dark blue, almost black; Q was dark purple, and R black and liquid, a sooty river. S was similar to F, U was blackish purple, W was blackish green, and Y was simply black.

Combinations of letters had their own colors. For example, when A joined with N to make "an" or "Ann" or "Anne," the result was a yellow-gold word instead of the lemon yellow of N that one might expect. "Ran," "tan," "Sandra" and "Shannon" are also luminous yellow-gold because the "an" sound dominates.

But "Nancy," even though it contains the "an" sound in standard (non-Southern) American speech, is a pale gray-yellow-green, the same color as "paint." I suppose that's because in Virginia, where I grew up, it didn't have an "an" ("Nan") sound; it was pronounced "Naincee." Even after decades of hearing the name pronounced with a strong "an" sound, I cannot make it change its hue. The colors set at the beginning of perception never change, apparently, neither for me nor for other people whose colored hearing has been studied by researchers. 

When I learned the names of the colors, the names took on the colors that they named: "red" is a red word, "yellow" is lemon-yellow, and so on. (I think that "yellow" would have been salmon pink because of the double l, had it not been influenced by the color it was naming.) Oddly enough, however, "black" became and remains a white word and "white" is black, keeping true to the colors of their vowels rather than to the colors they were naming. Could this have had anything to do with the fact that black and white are designated as "neutrals" rather than colors?

I have been asked, "If you don't like someone, does that person's name become an ugly color?" My answer is that the personality of the person and how I respond to it has nothing to do with the color of the name—it is the sound that has a color, not the personality. That's why "Sylvia" remains a radiant orange-pink word that I love to look at, even though in childhood I knew a girl named Sylvia who was decidedly unpleasant. And why "Shirley," the name of two of my closest friends in grade school, remains a dark, murky, somber word ruled by the letter r, the color of cold, black water.

Do any two people see words and sounds in the same colors? This is rarely the case. For example, Vladimir Navokov in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, told us about his own "fine case of colored hearing," which is quite different from what I experience:

"The long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. . . . Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. . . . I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.

"In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e's and i's, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, brassy with an olive sheen. In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and v is rose quartz." 

Nabokov's mother also had colored hearing, and saw many sounds in the same colors that he perceived. Some researchers believe synesthesia can be hereditary. (In my case, neither of my parents had this ability; but perhaps earlier ancestors did.) 

In his well-known poem, "Vowels," the 19th-Century French poet Arthur Rimbaud described his perception of colored vowels this way: "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue."

And for Rimbaud, the colors of the letters called into play other associations: "E, the glacier's insolence," "U, cycles, the divine vibrations of the seas, peace of herd-dotted pastures," and "O, the last trumpet, loud with strangely strident brass." 

To me, the letters conjure colors and sometimes texture and liquidity, but nothing else. In early childhood, however, the letters had definite positions in space. A was very high at the left, almost up in the sky, and the rest of the letters came down, one after another like beads in a necklace, in an elliptical path toward the right. Z was just below waist-high near my right hand. I don't think of them that way any more, however, and the memory of their spatial arrangement is faint.

An anonymous synesthesiac (or synesthete, as we are sometimes called), says that "Margaret is a pretty russet. Dorothy is sparkling yellow. The city of Atlanta is flame red. Elizabeth is a dark, clear blue. Marion is pale yellow." 

Not so for me. Margaret is light purple, while Dorothy is a rich red. Atlanta is a very pale gray-yellow-green, full of light. Elizabeth is a white name, or slightly gray. Marion is a luminous medium grown with overtones of green.

Music too is colored. It was so for Edna St. Vincent Millay, who described the brown-red blossom of the strawberry shrub as the "colour of dried blood, colour of the key of F." For me, the lower the pitch, the darker the color. The lowest note on the piano is dark, dark, shadowy gray, almost black, and the highest note is a very pale yellow with bright light shining through it.

Musical instruments all have their individual colorations. Despite its range of colors from light to dark, I think of piano music overall as yellow. Violins and violas give off russet tones; trumpets emit gold; harp notes are shadowy and watery; and clarinets wail in an orange edged in black. Banjo music is yellow-green. Of course, the pitch still influences the color; lower notes, even played on a russet-toned violin, are always dark.

One of the scientists who has conducted on research on synesthesia, particularly colored hearing, is Lawrence E. Marks. In an article in Psychology Today, he mentioned that synesthesia can be induced by certain drugs, which leads him to speculate that most people have the potential to experience synesthetic perception. He believes it likely that some mechanism in the human nervous system connects the various senses with each other and that this mechanism normally is active in only a small portion of the population. 

In a 1975 article in Psychological Bulletin, Marks says that several investigations report a much higher percentage of synesthesia among children than among adults, and suggests that the ability tends to be lost with age because it is replaced by what he terms "a more flexible mode of cognition," abstract language. 

I'm very glad that my acquaintance with abstract language did not destroy or make dormant my gift of drenching the world of words and sounds in color.

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