Synesthesia: A principle for the relationship between the primary colors and the cardinal vowels

Abstract

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles. Baudelaire, Le sonnet des voyelles Toute personne percevant une couleur eprouve la meme sensation et apprehende la meme qualite de vecu. C'est pourquoi la sensation que provoque la couleur est un langage sensible comprehensible partous sans recours au vocabulaire: un langage visuel. Luscher, 'Les couleurs sont des sentiments visualises'Synesthesia is, in rough terms, the spillover from one sense modality into another. An intense experience in one sense modality, sight for example, can lead to an accompanying sensation in another modality, such as hearing. Synesthesia is simultaneously one of the most simple and the most complex articulations of signs. The simplest in that the signifier and the signified are the same, just shifted by a sense modality. The most complex in that the signifier and the signified are simultaneous. That is, we speak of a sound 'evoking' a certain color, the sound becomes a sign for that color, but actually the sound and the color occur simultaneously -the sound and the color are part of the same sensory experience. We immediately interpret our sensations, pushing apart the two sensory experiences temporally, to allow one to signify the other. We see the human need to filter experience by a system of signification, to map sensation onto a logical grid. In a certain sense most signs are synesthetic -for example, the sound of a word is a sign for a visual concept, the sound of the spoken sound 'bird' is a sign for the image of the bird flying above. Although separated by the sensory modalities of hearing and sight, the two concepts 'meet in the brain' so to speak. This dual nature of Synesthesia -at once simple and complex -is reflected in our associations of the synesthetic Semiotica 58-1/2 (1986), 107-121.

A Psychological Experiment on the Correspondence between Colors and Voiced Vowels in Non-synesthetes'

“…Correspondence between red and /a/ is more difficult to explain. Perhaps formant structures play a role [16,17], yet a clear explanation remains to be provided. In experiment 1, a significant effect of the type of voice on color vowel matching was also found.…”

Cross-modal association between vowels and colours: A cross-linguistic perspective

“…As chromaticity decreases (i.e., for high vowels), the importance of the light-dark contrast will be increased. Ryalls (1986) developed Jakobson's ideas further. He proposed that there was an organizing principle in the vowel-colour mapping: vowel "primes" ([i,a,u]) were associated with the "visual primes" (i.e., the primary colours yellow, red, and blue because all colours can be derived from these three colours), and he used such associations to derive hypothetical associations for other vowels.…”

“…In addition, he suggested that the acute-grave (i.e., high front vs back) and diffuse-compact features of vowels parallel the chromatic (yellow-blue and green-red) and light-dark (white-black) contrasts of colours: acute-grave with yellow-blue; acute-grave with white-black; diffuse-compact with red-green. Ryalls (1986) proposed a perceptual link at the neurological level between the sense modalities of vision and hearing. Marks's (1975) meta-analysis of many case reports of coloured hearing revealed similar agreements across synaesthetes as also noted by Jakobson (1962) above: the vowel /a/ with red, /e/ and /i/ with yellow and white, /o/ with red and black, and /u/ with blue, brown, or black.…”