Singer-songwriter Lady Gaga considers her song “Poker Face” to be “deep amber”, while Billie Eilish thinks “Bad Guy” is yellow and smells like cookies. And for Berlin musician, Susanne Geisler, it’s not just sounds that are associated with colors. Along with four percent of the population, the three women are synaesthetes – and therefore have far more connected brains than most other people’s.

The world of Susanne Geisler is colourful, highly colourful. As soon as the Berliner reads or hears a certain number, it is always associated with a colour in her head. “For me, for example, the number one is black, twos are skin-coloured, and threes are olive green,” says the 42-year-old in an interview with Audio Infos Germany. “When the rows of tens and hundreds begin, all the others are coloured according to this first number.” So all tens have a black sheen, the twenties have a skin-colored sheen, and so on. The practical thing about it? “If I consciously memorise numerical combinations like a telephone number once, my brain remembers them for a lifetime,” says Geisler.

 

The connection makes the difference

 

The connection of letters and/or numbers with a colour is known in science as grapheme-color synaesthesia. The term synaesthesia comes from Greek, where syn means together and aisthesis means to feel. The German Synesthesia Society defines the term as follows: “Synaesthesia refers to a variant of cognition based on a neuronal brain structure in which different areas of the brain are connected in a special way.” This enables certain perception phenomena and thought processes that are not possible – or that occur in a different way – in a neurotypical brain.

 

“Not so pink!” demanded Liszt.

 

Synaesthetic perception is made possible by additional neuronal connections between the different areas of the brain responsible for processing different sensory stimuli such as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting or feeling. In addition, areas that are essential for cognitive phenomena such as memory or emotions can also be connected. What is certain is that the brains of synaesthetes have more nerve cells and nerve connections in certain areas.

 

 

According to the German Synaesthesia Society, one of the more common forms of this condition is coloured hearing, in which tones and noises create colors and sometimes shapes in the mind’s eye. Among the people with this special perception there are also many well-known musicians who are or were so successful, especially thanks to their special gifts. The Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, for example, is said to have asked the orchestra at a rehearsal in Weimar to play “a little bluer” and thus just as the key required. Furthermore, the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung quoted him at the end of the 19th century as saying: “That is a deep violet; I ask you to follow it! Not so pink!”

 

Coloured hearing: where there is sound, there is also colour

 

 

The German composer Hans Zimmer is also known as a colour-hearing synesthete, having written, among other things, the music for Hollywood films The Lion King and Dune – both scores winning him Academy Awards – and for the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Pharrell Williams, producer of the Daft Punk single Get Lucky claims to recognise false tones based on the “wrong colour”. Lady Gaga says she sees sound “like a wall of colour”,  her song Poker Face, for example, being a deep amber.  These artists’ stagings are also designed synaesthetically depending on the colour of the song.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Billie Eilish (Oscar for “No Time To Die”) claims to have particularly strong synaesthesia. When she thinks of her song Bad Guy, it is yellow and red and also corresponds to the number seven. Furthermore, it is “warm” and smells “like cookies”. In addition, every person she knows has their own colour, shape and number in her head, Eilish once explained.

 

 

 

 

 

The extra level that makes a lot of difference in creating music

 

Susanne Geisler also finds Billie Eilish’s music “extremely authentic and very experimental”. A trained lawyer, Geisler has been working as a songwriter and composer for years with the appropriate stage name, Kaleidoscope of Colours, and claims to have a special relationship with the way artists approach music, even without knowing in advance whether they are synaesthetes. “Colours provide us with an additional tool. If we only worked with notation, we would only be able to realise a fraction of our potential,” she says.

Synaesthetes tend to be free musicians who improvise a lot. Susanne, therefore, divides her own work as a composer into different levels: the auditory and emotional, where she first plays different sounds and fragments and observes what colours they trigger in her. “Which colour combination I like in the end has a lot to do with intuition and inspiration,” she explains. The visual level is simply an additional support she can take advantage of and try out how certain colour nuances affect the auditory level. It is no surprise, then, that her songs – https://www.kaleidoscopeofcolours.com/kaleidoscope-music/listen-1/ – have titles such as Shades of Brown, Titanium White or Midnight Blue.

 

Nothing is lost in the world of colour

 

The German Synaesthesia Society estimates that around four per cent of the population is affected by at least one form of synaesthesia. As several members of a family are often synaesthetically inclined, this particular type of perception is also hereditary. However, the degree of synaesthesia varies greatly from person to person. What Susanne Geisler has in common with her mother is that both women associate letters with colours as well as numbers.

However, which colours these are also differs from case to case. The musician, for example, perceives A as red, while B is earth-coloured, C is black, and D “tends towards blue”. And as with the numbers, the colours make it easier for the musician to memorise poems – or the 2,000 paragraphs of the German Civil Code, as in law school – in record time!

Susanne suggests a good small-talk starter at parties: as soon as she hears a new name, the letters of the name together form a colour. “Of course, people then want to know what colour. And everyone is afraid it might be something like poo brown,” she says with a laugh.

This Berlin-based artist also colours in the months and days of the week, although the colours are definitely meaningful. “Monday is midnight blue for me. For me, that means that the week hasn’t really started yet and I’m taking things slowly.” Tuesday, on the other hand, is a bright, radiant white with yellow tones, and Friday, which for many people is already part of the weekend, is still bright red for her.

The 42-year-old also recognises the dissenting side of colour, running riot in smells, touch, and emotions. “Fear, for example, goes hand in hand with different shades of red, most likely a carmine red, and also with a prickly shape that I locate in the abdomen.” One thing that stands out when talking to Susanne Geisler: colours are never just red, yellow or blue in her work, but are divided into many different nuances and shades. In order to reflect her emotional world, they have to be. For example, the carmine red colour associated with the feeling of fear does not occur in her music’s more positive connotations.

 

Many extra impressions can also become too much

What the musician describes as exciting and enriching for her life as a whole can also have “challenging aspects”, as she calls them. Susanne Geisler cannot control her synaesthesia and is repeatedly confronted with colours in her everyday life that she would rather not perceive. “All I can do is stop the stimulus that triggers the colours,” she says. To prevent it from becoming too much for her, she wears headphones in Berlin’s noisy traffic, for example. As she also associates touch with colours, clothing is also a sensitive area. “Clothes that are scratchy, tight or pinch create a hullabaloo in my senses,” she explains. And for acute anxiety situations, which would be unpleasant enough in themselves, she has a series of mindfulness exercises at the ready, which she can counteract by breathing and tapping. “I have to make sure that I organise my everyday life accordingly,” she says, summing up her special perception as a synaesthete. And she wouldn’t want to do without the gift that makes her world so unique. Source: Audio Infos Deutschland issue 275, February 29, 2024