Art & Technology
- Synaesthesia

The brain's adjustment of visual input has been a vital field of study for neurologists over the last twenty-five years. In 1973, Semir Zeki isolated a bean-sized area of brain cells in the prestriate cortex of the brain, that seemed responsible for creating colour impression, and named it V4. (This area responds to magnetism by generating colour hallucinations.) It receives its input from V1 cells in the primary visual cortex, where wavelength information is converted to some form of neural impulse that can be handled by V4. The implication of this discovery was explored by another neurologist, Oliver Sacks, in "The Case of the Colourblind Painter".
   The painter Jonathan I lost his colour vision at the age of 65, after a car accident. Not only did he lose colour from his normal vision but his dreams turned to black-and-white. Sacks inferred Mr. I's V4 centres had been knocked out, proving that V4 was responsible not only for formulating colour impressions of the outside world, but was the source of the internally-generated colours of hallucinations. Drawing on several cases, Sacks concluded that colour vision is highly dependent on V4, whose function was automatic rather than learned. While this might suggest that the brain performs simply another process in the mechanistic processing of light, Sacks was careful to point out that none of this limits the interpretation and meaning of colour:

   Such nice distinctions are preserved to account for the difference between brain and mind. Reconciling our thoughts to known electro-chemical reactions in the brain has become a core topic in neurology. Vision is crucial in deciphering perception and in the understanding of human consciousness: colour is a key to a debate in which familiar philosophical considerations have resurfaced. As with Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Newton, attempts are being made to fit concrete knowledge from new discoveries within a larger context - sometimes conservative or mystical - to account for the unknowable and the yet unknown.

   Mysticism in science is particularly prevalent today, evidenced by a spate of theological works authored by the scientific community. Most speculations involve nuclear physics and astrophysics, where light has critical roles to play. Colour, as a component of light, is implicated once again in metaphysical concerns. Likewise, at the beginning of this century, attempts to explain puzzling physical phenomena gave rise to all-embracing philosophies couched in spiritual language. That colour could accommodate spiritual interpretations, as well as convey decorative feelings, was an idea that sat easily with Roy De Maistre. His colour-music codes were intended for a wider purpose, as is clear from his speech at the opening of the "Colour in Art" show of 1919:

   De Maistre's exhibited work included five colour schemes for interiors (in collaboration with Lloyd Rees), elaborating ideas he had developed while designing therapeutic colour interiors for psychiatric hospitals. His passion for colour music, that saw him creating spectral keyboards (in association with Adrien Verbrugghen), culminated in the colour-music charts he put on display. With these coded arrangements, he attempted to supply a working system, to mathematically calculate colour harmony. Teaching at Sydney's Royal Art Society in 1913, Anthony Datillo Rubbo expressed similar concerns. He emphasised the interpretive role of the mind, maintaining that colour was in fact an internal sensation caused by light impressions received through the eyes and transferred to the brain. He acknowledged that colour effect was caused by light waves, as Newton described, but like Goethe, he held that local colours were chiefly illusory.
   De Maistre was a regular at the extended lunches Rubbo held at his studio and, at one of these, Margaret Preston gave a talk on her colour chart. It was covered by a cardboard wheel with holes cut in it; when the wheel was turned, colours appeared in the open spaces and decided Preston on the colour schemes for her paintings. Her device may have served as the prototype for De Maistre's similar Colour Harmonizing Chart, in which he put so much store.
   Rubbo's theories influenced several of his students to revolutionize their use of colour - the bright, sumptuous palettes of Grace Cossington-Smith and Roland Wakelin are due in part to his tutelage. Wakelin in turn had a liberating influence on Roy De Maistre, his co-exhibitor, though the latter's interests extended far beyond the confines of art school theory.

   There seemed to be a specially personal reason for the strength of De Maistre's beliefs. From second-hand reports, it seems he saw coloured visions when listening to music: both harmonies and melodies appeared in colour, and identical visions re-occurred when he re-listened to the same music. Others have reported similar experiences where not only music, but letters and numbers take on colours. The colours remain consistent for each person throughout their life, appearing in the mind's eye or as if projected on a screen in front of the person's eyes. These combined sensory responses to otherwise ordinary stimulation are clinically defined as synaesthesia. Other audio-visual hallucinations (from drugs, sensory deprivation, migraines, and dreams) are less predictable, more subjective, tending to overwhelm reality rather than supplement it. Still, they bear a qualitative resemblance to synaesthesia: these experiences can be so convincing that the hallucination appears to come from an outside source as part of the real world.
   The neurologist Richard Cytowic has described this experience as noesis, the same feeling that gives significance and importance to mystical religious experiences. He suggests that hallucinations can be so convincing that some people may be eager to yield to cosmic or theological explanations for the authority of their visions. As a corollary, one might describe any courting of psychedelic experience, or a fascination with synaesthesia, as a search for noetic meaning. In 1968, Lawrence Durrell put it rather differently in his novel "Tunc":

   One wonders if the Surrealist Varo's painting below is the sort of key that Durrell hankered after. Certainly the owl-like figure could be an exotic incarnation of the mystical gryphus, the 'perfect body' engaged in the Alexandrian art of spiritual alchemy. And Varo's act of imagination surely places her in a similar position, creating her own noetic field by committing it to canvas. Some of the mystery of the work is stripped away when its occult conventions are uncovered; the same conviction might be imputed to De Maistre's more literal use of a colour music code. Whether such paintings can convince the unbelieving viewer, or even enhance their creators' spirituality, is uncertain. Still, a painting is more concrete proof of belief than mere lip service and either artist is better off than Durrell's shy scientist or benighted saint.


Illustration 11 : "CREATION OF THE BIRDS", Remedios Varo, 1957.

On the left is a gourd-like apparatus, an animistic combination of an alchemical furnace, and the Philosophers' Egg that held the Philosopher's Stone. Fed from the outside world, it pumps the artists' primary colours of red, yellow and blue onto a painter's palette. The central figure holds a prism in its left hand, causing the light of a star to be refracted before falling on the work in progress. With its right hand, the bird-painter is still completing a drawing of a bird with the magic pigments, just as it springs to life under the enlivening influence of the spectral rays. Hanging like an amulet over the bird-painter's heart is a violin, its harmonic principles channelled through a conduit to guide the artist's pen. Music and colour, as sacred ingredients of the anima mundi, enable the bird-painter to harness the life force, creating colourful songsters after its own image.

   Since neuroscience teaches that mind and body are, to some degree, inseparable, some of its practitioners try to quantify the effects of spirituality. Herbert Benson, an Associate Professor at Harvard and author of "Timeless Healing", is presently running controlled experiments to assess the effect of prayer on coronary bypass patients. Yet other scientists have run tests on epileptics prone to ecstatic seizures, isolating a place in the brain that lights up during convulsions. They found it to be active in deeply religious people when prompted by mystical thoughts, so they dubbed it the 'God spot'.
   So neurology seems to suggest some conjunction of any visionary impulses with religiosity. De Maistre's work might serve as a convenient example: his colour music painting coincided with periods when he seemed most moved by the religious spirit - as a proto-spiritualist in Australia and as a Catholic convert in England. But Cytowic paints a more complex picture of synaesthesia. He speculates holistic perception, in which all the senses participate, is perhaps a primitive mode of cognition present in all of us. For most people, reason and logic functions in the cortex, the outer surface of grey matter, dominate their perceptions. Synaesthetes have a less differentiated understanding; they do not filter their surroundings and order their responses to the same degree. Established triggers (music in De Maistre's case) affect the seat of memory, emotion and relevance in the limbic system, the relatively unevolved region around the brain stem. Cytowic believes that emotive limbic activity drives general brain functions in all people, but sometimes produces hallucinations in synaesthetes. It may be that De Maistre's colour music paintings originated partly from such visions - that he had the capacity to harness his primitive perceptions and this fed his art.
   Hallucinations, such as De Maistre may have experienced listening to music, were systematically recorded as early as the 19th. century. Synaesthesia (where one sense triggers off a response in another) is found in about one person in every 25,000. The painter Mr. I, for one, had experienced a rich tumult of colour in response to different musical tones; when he became colour-blind, these subjectively-experienced colours disappeared. The neurologist Sacks concluded the effect was dependent on the V4 nerve centre in the brain (as was the similar colouring of dreams): after Mr. I's accident, his damaged V4 could no longer effectively respond to aural stimulation, ending his coloured visions.
   Sacks implies that intra-brain signals had been exchanged between the separate sections of the brain controlling visual and aural impressions - in fact, studies of the congenitally deaf demonstrate that these same stimuli can effect unexpected regions of the brain. It was found that the areas of the left temporal lobe, assigned a purely auditory function in hearing people, were re-assigned for vision processing and became highly active when sign language was used. In contradistinction. the keen hearing of many blind people is often used to supplement their visualization of the world (in responding to the acoustic 'shape' of a room, for example). Researchers at Manchester University's Department of Optometry aim to enhance this skill with a musical language, intended to describe shapes for the blind. Each aspect of a shape is associated with a particular sound, that can be written on a music stave; playing back the sounds could paint a picture of even complex objects. Experience of this system might be likened to synaesthesia - albeit to a formalized, learnt variety - though one wonders how an adept's appreciation of music might be affected.
   It seems clear the brain is highly flexible - not just a universal machine with pre-programmed, hard-wired centres, but a malleable entity, taking different forms according to the way it is sculpted by experience and the demands placed on it. The deaf and the blind seem able to realign brain functions through practice, prompted by necessity. Less voluntary responses occur in synaesthetes' brains - there are some indications the condition could be hereditary - but they follow orderly patterns, intermingling their reactions to set sensory inputs. Quite different are the hallucinations of auditory schizophrenia; these are not prompted by external stimulation of one of the senses. But MRI scans taken at Melbourne's Mental Health Research Institute have shown that activity in the auditory cortex accompanies the schizophrenic episodes. It seems the brain is capable of generating seemingly real sensations of its own accord, an experience that most of us become aware of only in dreams. While we rely on our sensory perceptions to regulate our waking hours, it is likely that some consensual view of reality constrains our fullest responses and kerbs the imagination. After all, a vast array of possibilities is available to any brain, through the variety of connections that trillions of neurones provides. Some intra-brain linkage of the senses is feasible, even probable, in many individuals and more precise neurological explanations may emerge to account for some perceived similarities in the experiencing of colour and music.

   It is tempting to see, in the phenomenon of synaesthesia, a genuine source of a colour music experience. Indeed, current understanding of synaesthesia has reignited interest in putative links between music and colour, as they are deployed in the arts. Just so, studies of synaesthetes in the late 1800s had formed a backdrop for major overhauls in aesthetic attitudes in the early 20th century. Colour-music codes, however, do not provide reliable guides to synaesthesia; rather, they seem didactic exercises, bound by rules and historical precedents, shrouded in visionary import and formalistic interpretations. Some intellectual systems, such as the "modes of limited transposition" employed by Olivier Messiaen, to compose music akin to his personal visions, come closer to providing an individual testimony to synaesthesia. But orthodox colour music has proven resistant to even fundamental shifts in scientific thinking, encumbered as it is with its metaphysical agenda. It is unlikely to respond to any fresh biological imperatives based on the neurology of synaesthesia.
   More contentiously, subjective experiences were tellingly described in "Thought Forms", co-authored by the Reverend C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant in 1901 under the auspices of the Theosophical Society. Attributed to clairvoyance rather than synaesthesia, the visions were purported to demonstrate the invisible but true form of the music, discernible by the privileged few with the gift of second sight. Gounod's "Soldiers' Chorus' from "Faust" was described as the whole spectrum radiating in a sort of expanding globe: Wagner's "Meistersingers" was variously seen as a 900-foot high bell, or ramparts of mountains and rolling clouds shot through with radiating and flickering colours. Put in the service of a spiritualist belief system, these visions were claimed as evidence of a cosmological order that connected a variety of physical and psychic phenomena.


Illustration 12 : THE SOLDIER'S CHORUS from Gounod's Faust
in "Thought Forms", by A. Besant & C. W. Leadbeater, 1901.

   Newton himself expressed puzzlement regarding "by what modes or action (light) produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour". He had stressed mechanistic processes, examining light as an objective and external phenomena that had no colour in itself, simply the capacity to differently affect the retina which then transferred colour impressions directly to the brain. Some noticeable effects - coloured shadows and after-images - could not be accounted for by Newtonian optics; the ability to dream in colour was certainly not to be explained by the action of a variety of wavelengths on the retina. Colour impression is a subjective matter, and the continuous flow of spectral colour has to be interpreted by common understanding, to plot locations of different colours. The human eye can distinguish over 130 hues in the spectrum alone, but selection amongst them is subject to personal, cultural and practical considerations.    As part of the Romantic reaction to the impersonal science of the Enlightenment, William Blake railed against 'Newton's sleep' while J. W. von Goethe pilloried Newtonian optics in his 1810 "Theory of Colours". The basic tenets of the colour-music code came under specific attack when Goethe wrote on colour in Relation to the Theory of Music:    One could almost hear Newton's reply, by referring to that self-same 'higher law'. Unbeknownst to Goethe, the laws of optics had been rewritten at the start of the 19th century, when Wünsch and Young found ways to measure wavelengths of light. Newton's theories came in for an overhaul: the corpuscular theory of light was overthrown and Huygen's neglected wave model dusted off. For the first time, by comparing wavelengths of colour and sound, the structures of colour music schemes could be objectively assessed. More generally, measurements of the spectrum were refined and the way its colours interacted with the eye was explored. A new set of additive primaries - red, green and blue-violet - was proposed, as the basic transmitted lights involved in colour vision. Lacking those scientific insights, Goethe had opted for an approach reclaimed from the past, from Aristotle and even alchemy, where all colour could be understood as the interaction of light and dark, reducible to two primaries of yellow and blue.    So a further fantastic dimension was added to the study of colour, pursuing the premise that optical truth resided in the optical illusions and other anomalies of vision that had drawn Goethe's attention. In an irony of history, the metaphysical implications of the colour-music code were revived as the Newtonians' second line of defence, and become included in standard texts at art colleges. From there, colour music proved most useful to aesthetes and academics, musing about its abstract possibilities. As late as the 1920s, the principles of "Opticks" were generally endorsed by the philosopher Oswald Spengler, who singled out Newton's "Opticks", not for its scientific repercussions, but for the profound change it produced on the direction of theology.


   The English seemed to take particular delight in flaunting the colour music ideal in the face of continental rivals. The paint manufacturer George Field produced a fine example that he published in "Chromatography" of 1825. For his colour circle, he used the standard painter's arrangement of six divisions adapted from Newton's disc. The primaries red, yellow and blue were separated by the secondaries orange, green and purple and, for the first time, were shown polarized between warm or cool. But his musical scales of colour were altogether more varied. One arrangement might be a spectral sequence aligned to an E scale, while the one shown above was applied to the scale of A. Field had reverted to an Aristotelian dark-to-light range that culminated in the primaries which, for him, symbolized the Trinity. He may have been longing for pre-Newtonian values, pining for a lost romanticized era like many of his customers: the Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt, for one, relied on Field's clear and pure pigments to achieve his dazzling optical effects.
   Field's theories were consulted by Owen Jones, when designing the interior of the Crystal Palace in 1850. Trials of the colour scheme excited a great deal of public debate and the primaries of red, yellow and blue were eventually chosen, in the proportions of five red, three blue and eight yellow to give the perfect balance recommended by Field. To increase the apparent size of the interior, different structural elements were coloured separately - curved members coloured yellow, lattice girders blue, and joists of the glass roof picked out in red. Different colours were separated by a strip of white, to avoid the effects of simultaneous contrast. The final effect was enchanting; at close range, the colours were vivid but seen over the 1850-foot length of the building they optically merged into a shimmering, Turneresque grey.
   The French. too, had their man in the chemist M. E Chevreul, who was appointed as manager to the Gobelin tapestry firm. There, he was alerted by customers' complaints to anomalies between the colours stipulated and their appearance in completed works. Chevreul found, by comparing yarns of different hues, that any colour affected those adjacent to it by simultaneous contrast, lending them a tinge of its complementary. Thus, a thin red stripe on a black ground gave the black a greenish cast. Chevreul published his findings as "De la Loi du Contraste des Couleurs", an encyclopaedic analysis of subjective colour impressions of 1839. His principles, like Field's, were consulted as part of the elaborate commissioning process for England's Crystal Palace. No doubt, Chevreul's theories were highly regarded and are often cited as influencing the techniques and colour choices of French painters, from Delacroix to the post-Impressionists. Perhaps this is why Van Gogh, while in Paris during the 1880s, carried with him a small Japanese lacquer box holding balls of yarn, with one or two different colours for each ball, that could demonstrate Chevreul's complementary effects of colour.