The expression “visual music” is reminiscent of the proverbial square circle. It sounds like a category mistake. Music directly addresses the sense of hearing. We do not need to use our eyes to experience it.
“Visual music” might refer to visual art that tries to capture something of the character of music. Walter Pater provocatively said that all art aspires to the condition of music (1980: 106). Some visual artists overtly pursue this goal. Piet Mondrian, for example, sought to convey rhythm by means of his painting. Henri Matisse aimed to achieve impressions akin to those wrought by jazz improvisation in Jazz, a series of works using stenciled cut-outs.
Music has always offered visual as well as aural enjoyment, however. Until modern recording technology enabled us to separate the aural track from the activities that produce it, music was always “live,” and musicians’ physical movements were visually accessible to those who were relatively nearby. The enjoyment of seeing music-makers in action remains one of the attractions of live concerts today.
Vision is often directly involved in the performance of music as well. Conductors use visual signals to indicate the time and the manner in which particular musical sounds should be produced. Performers within ensembles similarly use gesture to cue each other or prompt tighter synchronization. The audience itself is sometimes involved in such gestural behavior, as when listeners make hand movements to mark rhythm in classical Indian music.
If we restrict the expression “visual music” to works within the musical medium, music can be visual in a variety of ways besides those already mentioned. First, musical notation itself is a visual means of communicating music, and often it is simply referred to as “the music.” Although designed primarily for preserving musical works and facilitating coordination among performers, the score is sometimes also visually attractive. Famous historical examples of scores which are visual artworks are two constructed by Baude Cordier (c.1380–1440). The score for his “Belle, bonne, sage,” a love chanson, is shaped like a heart, and it includes red notes which add to the score’s visual appeal while also indicating rhythmic changes. For his “Tout par compass,” an eternal canon, Cordier used a circular staff. To recognize their wittiness, one needs to see these scores. Even notation not obviously geared to visual pleasure is sometimes treated as visual art, as when passages of medieval notation are framed and hung on walls in the present day.
A second species of visual music includes certain avantgarde works that can only be accessed by means of sight. A performance of John Cage’s 4'33" is an example. The work consists of a pianist sitting down at the piano for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and then standing and bowing to the audience. While the non-sighted might be informed about what is going on, direct experience of this “music” depends on seeing the performance. Other avant-garde music, too, employs visually observed antics that have theatrical effect. Henry Cowell’s works that instruct the performer to reach inside the piano and pluck the strings by hand, or to roll the bell of a trombone directly on the strings, would be cases in point. Although the sounds produced can be registered as nonstandard by the ear, the precise character of these unconventional performance techniques would be hard to identify by means of hearing alone.
A third type of visual music is the wide array of music that is synchronized with visually perceived performance in other media. Dance and opera both fall under this category. More experimental forms, from Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk to the musical performance art of the 1960s Fluxus group and beyond, employ music in explicitly multi-media productions.
Soundtracks, too, whether integrated with film, television, video, or cartoons, coordinate musical and visual processes. In most of these cases, the soundtrack is taken to be an accompaniment to a form that is more prominently visual. The music video, developed in the early 1980s, however, attempts to reverse this hierarchy, with the visual stream presented as an accompaniment to the music. (One might question whether this reversal has been completely effective. Given the dominance of the visual sense, one might argue that the music video actually relegates the music that is supposed to be the central attraction to a secondary role.)
A noteworthy species of multi-media work specifically seeks to integrate light and color into musical performance. This aspiration has led to the development of diverse, eccentric machines called color organs. One interesting instance was the ocular harpsichord constructed around 1730 by Father Louis Bertrand Castel, a Jesuit priest. He connected a frame with a series of windows to a harpsichord. When a note was sounded, one of the windows would open, revealing a color. Georg Philipp Telemann was sufficiently intrigued by this device that he wrote some pieces for it. Another famous color organ was that designed for use in Scriabin’s symphony, Prometheus: A Poem of Fire. Scriabin had color indications written into the score for the work, and the color organ was to project colors on a screen (and ideally the audience) as the music unfolded. (For a fascinating summary of the history of color organs, see Moritz 1997.) The contemporary employment of artistic lighting in connection with rock concerts and other musical performances might be seen as a later manifestation of the same ambition to combine music with color, along with music-playing computer programs that enable individual consumers to enjoy blinking light displays accompanying musical playback.
Music can also be visual as a result of synesthesia. Synesthesia occurs when the stimulation of a particular sensory mode occasions stimulation of another. I will consider musical synesthesia in both narrow and broader senses, the first being a relative rarity, the second a common phenomenon.
Musical synesthesia in the narrow sense is the spontaneous association of aurally experienced music with “phantom” percepts normally experienced through another sensory modality. This kind of synesthesia is called “idiopathic.” The associations are involuntary, and they occur only “in the mind’s eye” (Cytowic 1993: 76). That is, they are not intersubjectively observable, and the percepts involved tend to be incomplete objects characterized by isolated qualities that are relatively mono-dimensional (such as isolated blinking patterns or shapeless auras of color). Often non-synesthetes find a description of these percepts puzzling. Walt Disney’s Fantasia offers some impression of this type of synesthetic experience when images of violin bows being played in an orchestra transform into moving linear flecks. Idiopathic synesthesia is relatively uncommon, and synesthetes do not share a common set of experiences. The particular phantom percepts and their specific behavior are unique to each synesthete.
The idiopathic musical synesthete’s experience adds a dimension to the enjoyment of music, but it does not seem to provoke much envy (except on the part of certain artists, such as Scriabin). In fact, researchers and cultural commentators have often denigrated synesthesia. The Oxford Companion to the Mind, for example, characterizes synesthesia as epistemologically deficient:
Confusion between the senses: for example, some musicians experience colours for particular notes. The effect can become dramatic in some drug states, presumably through loss of normal inhibitory mechanisms which isolate the central processing of the senses.
(Gregory 1987: 765)
Certain late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists of cultural decadence considered synesthesia a hallmark of degeneration. In 1895, for example, Max Nordau asserted of synesthesia:
It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.
(Quoted in Dann 1998: 33)
Negative views of synesthesia do not appear to be restricted to Western society. Alan Merriam observes something similar in his interactions with the Basongye people of Africa:
While I do not regard my own tentative efforts as being “experimental” in any sense, it is apropos to report that no informant among the Basongye either admitted to synesthesic experience or, indeed, even considered questioning along this line to fall clearly within the bounds of normal sanity.
(Merriam 1964: 93)
The idiosyncrasy of the perceptions involved presumably explains why many consider idiopathic synesthesia irrelevant to musical experience at best – only one in a hundred thousand people are idiopathic synesthetes (Gage 1998: 350– 1). It does not seem to have much to do with the musical experience for most listeners.
Musical synesthesia understood in a broader sense, however, is a common phenomenon. The appreciation of music through multiple sensory modalities is, in fact, typical for the human species. I will defend the claim that musical experience in general has a synesthetic dimension and suggest that this helps to explain why music is so easily associated with extra-musical phenomena, from cartoons to ethical ideals.
That other senses besides hearing are involved in musical experience is evident from the visual aspects of musical appreciation that we have already considered. Musical experience also has a tactile character, which is demonstrated by the fact that deaf people can enjoy music by means of touch.
Touch is engaged by music in virtue of the evolution of the auditory system. The auditory system seems to have evolved from pressure-sensitive cells along the bodies of fish. These cells enabled fish to detect movements of other entities in the water. Some of these cells eventually moved to the interior of the fish’s head, becoming the vestibular system. The next stage of this evolutionary process was the development of three canals along the three dimensions of space relative to a fish’s body. Each canal has a sack adjacent to it. Hairs attached to neurons at the base of each sack push their way through a layer of gelatin with calcium balls resting at the bottom. When the fish moves, the calcium balls move the hairs. This alerts the neurons and ultimately the brain as to how fast the fish is moving. At a further point in the evolutionary process, vibrations in the water were sufficient to move the calcium balls. This ability to register external vibrations amounted to a new sensory mode: hearing. (For a more detailed discussion, see Jourdain 1997: 15.)
One consequence of this origin of hearing is that the auditory system remains closely linked to the vestibular system, which enables us to maintain balance. The connection between music and dance is grounded in the direct association of these two systems (Nussbaum 2007: 99–100). Charles Nussbaum suggests another consequence of the emergence of hearing from our system for managing bodily orientation. According to Nussbaum, music exploits the very system that we use when interacting with the external world, specifically our ability to mentally model features of our environment in preparation for action. In the case of music, we mentally “represent virtual layouts and scenarios in an imaginary musical space in which the listener acts (off-line)” (Nussbaum 2007: 21). In other words, we engage in an imaginary exploration of musical space when listening to music. Music arouses our motor systems, although the overt movements they prompt are mostly inhibited. (This inhibition, however, is only relative, as can be recognized from listeners’ propensity to tap their feet, to sway, to clap, and to dance.)
Nussbaum’s account associates music not only with the tactile but also with the kinesthetic sense. In fact, he suggests that our ability to employ metaphors in relation to music depends more fundamentally on our tactile and kinesthetic responses than on our aural experience. He draws on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of metaphor (1980), in particular on the claim that we derive our abstract concepts from concepts related to bodily orientation and movement. Lakoff and Johnson contend that there is an asymmetry of transference between images derived from the various sensory domains: touch and kinesthetic experience dominate and provide metaphors for other sensory spheres, as opposed to the reverse. This suggests that the tactile and kinesthetic character of musical experience is more basic than its auditory character to our ability to relate to it metaphorically and to associate it with extra-musical meaning. The widespread use of height metaphors in relation to pitch provides support for this rather surprising contention.
Nussbaum’s discussion suggests that our musical experience is always synesthetic. While he stresses the tactile and kinesthetic dimensions of musical synesthesia, the evidence of human discourse about music suggests that people associate music with the entire sensorium. The use of cross-modal terms in connection with music is widespread. Many such uses do relate features of music to the tactile and kinesthetic. Among these is the already noted application of the “high–low” continuum to pitch, a pattern that occurs in many languages and cultures. The German “dür” (“hard”) and “möll” (“soft”) in reference to major and minor modes also associates the musical with the tactile. The Kaluli of Papua New Guinea employ the spatial image of “lift-up-over-sounding” and the tactile term “hardness” to describe their musical ideal (Feld 1984: 390–2). Western tempo indications commonly designate styles of movement, which would typically be experienced visually and kinesthetically, for example, andante, which literally means “walking.”
However, terminology from the experience of other senses is also in evidence. Another Western term indicating performance manner, dolce, or “sweetly,” links a musical quality to flavor. “Bright” and “dark” are used so commonly in reference to music that it is easy to miss the fact that these words are most commonly linked to vision. The vocabulary of color is also pervasively applied to musical tone, as neurologist MacDonald Critchley points out:
The metaphorical use of chromatic terms to describe auditory experiences is a literary commonplace, sometimes grossly overplayed. Oscar Wilde, for example, wrote that “her voice was exquisite . . . but it was wrong in colour.” Elsewhere he referred to the vermilion lips of Salome . . . “like the scarlet blast of trumpets.” Proust spoke of the “red and mysterious” appeal of the Vinteuil septet, and in another place he mentioned the “geranium scent” of the music.
(Critchley 1977: 226)
Proust is not alone in associating music with smell. The Kota tribe in south India also use olfactory terms in connection with music, and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia refer to the taste or smell of a song (Wolf 2001). (See also Ellis (1985: 68), who notes that the same word is used for “taste” and “melody” in Pitjantjatjara, and Chatwin (1987: 58).)
This diversity of cross-sensory references reminds us that the senses are not as separate as we sometimes imagine. Hearing, touch, and the kinesthetic sense have a special evolutionary connection, but all the senses communicate with each other. The aberration is the case of a percept being accessed exclusively through one sense. As Merleau-Ponty observes, our senses work in tandem in ordinary perception:
The senses intercommunicate by opening on to the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of shavings. . . . The form of a fold in linen or cotton shows us the resilience or dryness of the fibre, the coldness or warmth of the material. . . . In the jerk of the twig from which a bird has just flown, we read its flexibility or elasticity, and it is thus that a branch of an apple-tree or a birch are immediately distinguishable.
(Merleau-Ponty 1964: 229–30)
The synesthetic intermingling of sensory qualities in the phenomenology of experiencing objects is a consequence of the way our senses operate in our coming to know objects. Immanuel Kant (1998) observed that our various sensory tracks are mentally consolidated into a general representation of the external world. We take the data from vision, hearing, and touch, for example, to yield information about the same world, and this data all contributes to our mental representation of reality. In many, if not most, cases our senses apprehend objects through multiple channels simultaneously. The same table that I see is an object of touch and hearing when I rap on it.
The qualities of the table just mentioned are apprehended by distinct senses, but some qualities do not seem to be restricted to a particular sense. Long before Kant, Aristotle reflected on the fact that certain qualities of objects were simultaneously perceived by multiple senses. He termed these qualities “common sensibles”:
The senses perceive each other’s special objects incidentally; not because the percipient sense is this or that special sense, but because all form a unity: this incidental perception takes place whenever sense is directed at one and the same moment to two disparate qualities in one and the same object, e.g. to the bitterness and the yellowness of bile; the assertion of the identity of both cannot be the act of either of the senses.
(Aristotle 1941: 582 (425a30–425b3))
Aristotle’s suggestion is that some sensory qualities are not consigned to a single sense, but are accessed by two or more simultaneously. E. M. Hornbostel (1927) similarly proposes that we experience a number of “amodal sensory qualities,” such as brightness, darkness, and roughness, which are not uniquely directed toward a single sensory modality. His explanation resonates with Nussbaum’s kinesthetic thesis. Hornbostel suggests that the stimulation of one sense affects another because it operates on body tonus, which is in communication with all the senses. (See also Cytowic 1989: 306.)
Gestalt psychologist W. S. Boernstein draws on Hornbostel’s account to link synesthesia with human cognition. He claims that thinking developed as a means for human beings to engage in “internalized movement; i.e., a movement is first anticipated, and then carried out” (Boernstein 1970: 676). A precondition for this internalized movement is the integration of the effects of the multiple sensory modes and amodal sensory stimulation on body tonus (Cytowic 1989: 307–8). Synesthesia, in other words, is a precondition for developing the capacity to think.
Lawrence Marks spells out another connection between synesthesia and thinking. Noting that young children readily formulate associations between qualities apprehended by different sensory modes, he argues that such synesthetic “discoveries” facilitate the capacity to form metaphors. “To pass from similarity within one sense to similarity between two senses is to undergo a metamorphosis, to establish a new process, which provides an elementary basis for metaphoric resemblance” (Marks 1978: 188). Marks and colleagues propose that synesthetic association may be fundamental to cognitive development.
Perhaps “stumbling onto” cross-modal similarities can precipitate a subsequent search for other similarities within diverse domains – in our view, the very crux of metaphor. . . . The direction of this search, we contend, is implicitly if not explicitly inward, into phenomenal experience, into the mind’s eyes and ears. If so, then cross-sensory metaphors . . . may provide one key to understanding more generally the establishment in childhood of metaphoric competencies.
(Marks, Hammeal, and Boernstein 1987: 84; see also Marks 1978: 189–91)
The connection made here between synesthesia and metaphor-formation offers insight into the cross-cultural tendency to associate musical details with nonmusical content. Of course, the pitch/rhythm/timbre complex that is music (narrowly conceived) can be linked to referential language, and thus content of any sort can be grafted onto the musical stream. But not just any content will do for a given bit of music. The art of text-setting presupposes a notion of aptness in regard to how music and words are connected. Impressions of similarity between the connotations of words and the metaphors suggested by music may provide the basis for acceptable linkages.
More strikingly, metaphorical transference enables many uses of musical details to teach and reinforce patterns of importance to a society. Music is an unparalleled mnemonic, as the Australian Aboriginals recognize. They employ musical metaphors to help them navigate the environment, applying the synesthetic character of music that Nussbaum notes to very practical ends. They correlate the stream of a song with features of the physical environment. Their songs serve as literal maps, with contours and details that correspond to the shape of the land and its physical landmarks. The efficiency of this form of musical mapping is demonstrated by the fact that people from different tribes who do not share a common language can nevertheless recognize the landscape encoded in each other’s songs.
Nussbaum contends that music’s relationship to our internal navigational system provides the basis for our sense of music’s relevance to extra-musical content. One such domain is ethical experience. Ethnomusicologists have observed that valued behavioral styles within a society are reflected in its music, if not directly instilled by it. Alan Lomax (1962) formulated the theory that a society’s song style reflects the character of its ideals of social interaction, through such features as the way that male and female voices interact and how cooperative effort is organized (whether through hierarchical direction or more spontaneous emergence). Sound structure mirrors social structure as it is ideally understood (cf. Feld 1984).
The synesthetic character of musical perception also suggests an explanation for our tendency to relate visual images to music when none are directly presented. Until recent times one could only hear music in the vicinity of music-makers, so that typically listeners were able to take in the context through the whole sensorium. Modern recording technology, however, has made possible the delivery of music as a decontextualized stream of sound. In contrast to most of our experiences, the disembodied sonic stream dissociates our sensory modes, with aural/tactile apprehension being disconnected from what we perceive visually.
Nevertheless, music prompts visual reveries. Music is designed to make pattern forcefully conspicuous, and it is present to us with particular immediacy. The clarity and immediacy of music in the auditory and tactile domains makes one aware of a reality that transcends one’s own body, even when one listens to a recording. Because music is so salient to us, with the same pattern manifest both aurally and tactilely, it makes listeners strongly aware of their connection with the larger world, even in the absence of visual reinforcement of the patterns the musical signal provides. Given that we relate to the larger world with our entire sensorium, the powerful impression of connection with the world that we obtain through music enlivens our senses all together, and we are motivated to respond with our entire bodies (as we do in dancing). The intensity of our aural and tactile impressions of the musical signal, by stimulating the rest of the sensorium, encourages us to seek content for the visual sense, which predominates in most of our interactions with the world. Hence, we find the combination of music with the actions of cartoon characters quite natural. The construction of programs in connection with instrumental music (a popular pastime in the nineteenth century, when absolute music had attained preeminence) also builds on our impression that a world so palpably present to touch and hearing should have a visual aspect as well. (Diana Raffman (1993) makes a case that is formally similar when she argues that the similarities between the structural features of music and language trick the mind into expecting a semantics in music, just as it finds a semantics in language.)
More theoretically, synesthesia also sheds light on the notion of the musical persona, the postulated agent that undergoes the events that instrumental music portrays. We have noted that the percept experienced by the idiopathic synesthete is something less than a fully fledged object. As Richard E. Cytowic explains, “The synesthetic percept is more like a moment of an incomplete object rather than the unfolding of a dream-like story with subject-object relations” (1989: 311). The musical percept, when isolated from context, is a bit like the synesthetic percept in this respect. The musical percept seems to engage in behavior, but it is difficult to characterize the nature of the agent. This difficulty has prompted some to utilize the notion of a “persona” (e.g. Levinson 2006). But the vagueness of the persona idea leads others to think we should eschew it. Peter Kivy complains, “The musical persona is such a vague, abstract, shadowy being that even ‘its’ sex cannot be determined” (2003: 116).
Music’s synesthetic appeal, however, suggests some usefulness in the persona idea. One case in which music models extra-musical content, a possibility that the synesthetic involvement of multiple senses affords, is the common impression that the movement of music is akin to the activity of an agent. The persona notion acknowledges the indeterminate character of both behavior and agent in the auditory signal, but also reflects the fact that music suggests a world available to our whole sensorium. By speaking of a musical persona, one acknowledges the indefiniteness of any features of the “agent” who seems to behave through the music beyond the characteristics of the behavior itself. This indefiniteness makes room for the formulation of analogies between the behavior presented through the music and other content (so long as one is aware of their subjective character) as an outgrowth of our relating to music with our whole sensory apparatus engaged. The vagueness of the idea of the persona also reflects our ability to tolerate indefiniteness in our impression of an agent, much as the idiopathic synesthete has no difficulty attending to percepts of incomplete character.
Ordinary musical listening is synesthetic in that it involves the fusion of sensory streams into an integrated experience. The modeling that musical synesthesia affords is open-ended, but it is constrained by the aesthetic requirement of affective and other kinds of coherence. Charles Hartshorne draws attention to our mental tendency to form associations with music, noting that our satisfaction as listeners depends on the congruence of affect with sensory experience:
[I]t is impossible to attend to the notes except in so far as the mind stands ready to synthesize or fuse them into a total emotional integration, involving the entire conscious being, with which they are congruent. No one can listen to complex music without thinking. . . . The art of aesthetic appreciation is to “associate” with the object solely the images and reactions whose affective content will permit the sensory content to remain in the focal center rather than such as will displace it; therefore – and this is the same thing in other words – which will find the supreme illustration of their own “spirit” in that sensory content – as all the spirit of a piece of music is concentrated in its principal theme.
(Hartshorne 1934: 189)
Our senses band together when encountering music, and in tandem arouse the whole nervous system, which generates our intellectual and emotional response. Thus, synesthesia’s multi-modal impact is compelling, and its forcefulness awakens the heart and the mind, along with the senses. In effect, music meets us everywhere, through all our receptive capacities. That is what we mean by “the power of music,” a power that depends on synesthesia.
See also Music and dance (Chapter 43), Music and motion pictures (Chapter 42), Music’s arousal of emotions (Chapter 22), and Psychology of music (Chapter 55).
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