Music and Synesthesia

For Duke Ellington, a D note looked like dark blue burlap while a G was light blue satin. When Pharrell Williams listened to Earth, Wind & Fire as a kid, he saw burgundy or baby blue. For Kanye West, pianos are blue, snares are white, and basslines are dark brown and purple. Orange is a big one for Frank Ocean.

All of these artists—along with Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Mary J. Blige, Blood Orange's Dev Hynes, and more—have synesthesia, a condition in which a person's senses are joined. They hear a certain timbre or musical note and see a color, or smell a perfume and hear a sound, or see a word and taste a flavor. But while it may seem like tons of musicians are trying to associate themselves with synesthesia nowadays—Steen says she's heard rumors about Beyoncé having it, though "she hasn't been vetted yet so I don't know for sure"—the condition wasn't always seen as an express route to creative genius.

So what do sound-color synesthetes actually, you know, see when they hear music? Well, it depends; each synesthete has a unique color palette with unique triggers, and the colors and types of sense associations are always in flux. For Steen, the empty rumble of an 18 wheeler hitting potholes outside of her apartment sends up a black and white and orange static pattern in front of her eyes. "We see it in our mind's eye," she says, "and the colors are not the colors of pigment, but rather the colors you see on your computer screen, the colors of light. They're bright."

And when I ask Steen why so many synesthetes seem to be finding their way to careers in the arts nowadays instead of becoming physicists or lawyers, her answer is simple: "If you were surrounded by color all of your life, and it really thrilled you, wouldn't you want more of it?"