RE:"What kind of key"

[Tim Conway <tpconway@ozemail.com.au>]

Jeff and f-minor listers,

Re the keys-and-colour subject.

Please forgive me in advance for being vague in what follows. 

In a fairly recent issue of, I think, New Scientist there was an article 
about 'cross-senses', although that wasn't the term used. What the exact 
term was I cannot recall except that it was Latin-sounding and may have 
had 'trans-' in it. 

Anyway, it seems to be scientifically accepted that some people have the 
ability to perceive one sense with another. For example, some people 
'see' sounds, others 'hear' colours, and even taste and smell give rise 
to other sensations, although not as strongly. In a related way, Vladimir 
Nabokov claimed to associate colours very strongly with certain words: he 
always knew when he had written a 'beautiful' sentence. I believe that VN 
admitted that his colour-word association was so natural and so strong 
that it influenced his style of writing. His son has/had the same ability 
(if memory serves).

If all that is so, it may be possible that some people do really 
associate keys with actual colours. That is not to say that such people 
do so by whim or fancy -- they do so by force: whenever they hear a key 
they experience the colour as strongly as if they were seeing it, and 
they have no choice in the matter. The NS article, as I remember, quoted 
a researcher who said that a list of colours that a certain woman 
associated with certain notes (sounds) changed hardly at all over a long 
period of many years. The intervals between testing her were sometimes so 
large that it was most unlikely that she could have remembered her 
previous answers to the question: 'What colour does this note bring to 
mind?'.

Before I read the NS article I read somewhere else that a number of 
composers claimed to have this gift/infliction. Please don't ask me who 
they were or where I read it. I cannot remember. I also think that people 
with so-called perfect pitch may also have been said to have had it. If 
that is so, GG is the perfect candidate for associating colours (and who 
knows what else?) with certain sounds/keys/notes. He was said, I believe, 
to have had perfect pitch, and he also composed. Besides, his absolute 
assertions about the way a piece should be played may also be an 
indication that it was not just his ears and sense of rhythm/timing that 
dictated to him how to play it -- sorry, that's not exactly what I mean 
to say but I haven't the time to think it out clearly.

The upshot is: more than a few people may really associate colours with 
keys.

And on a slightly different tack, is there such a thing as perfect pitch? 

I seem to remember hearing the respected English 
musicologist/singer/author/broadcaster John Amis once say on the radio 
that he didn't believe that anyone had perfect pitch. He admitted to 
having relative pitch but he felt it didn't last long, a few days at the 
most (I hope I'm not misquoting JA here: the broadcast was several years 
ago). That is, if he heard the oboe play A-natural (or whatever) at a 
concert tune-up, he could recall that note perhaps 2 or 3 days later; but 
if he was shipwrecked on a desert island for a year or so he wasn't sure 
he would be able to reproduce that note except by luck. He didn't know of 
any musician who could hear a note and say 'That's about an eighth lower 
than B-flat', or who could reproduce by voice (say), and with ease, any 
note requested (unless, of course, they were played a 'base' note first 
and allowed to remember it, then progress to other notes relatively).

Any thoughts, anyone?

Tim Conway
<tpconway@ozemail.com.au>