Dirty Light - Marko Ciciliani

Cohen (1958- ) estimated a ratio of 1:2,000 (1996). Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (1951- ) and
Edward M. Hubbard, and in more recent publications also Cytowic indicated the ratio 1:200
(2001). 11
Around the 1930s a lot of scientific research was undertaken in the field of synaesthesia. Most
notably the Berlin Psychological Institute, led by the German philosopher and psychologist
Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) and the Austrian ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel (1877-
1935) conducted significant research in synaesthesia involving the visual and auditory organs.
The psychologist Albert Wellek (1904-1972) introduced the term Ur-Synaesthesia for
analogies between the auditory and visual domains that appear to be universal and crosscultural.
Wellek assessed six such basic cross-sensual correlations:
1. a) thin – thick = high – low (pitch);
b) sharp (pointy) – (blunt) heavy = high – low (pitch);
2. fast, agile (light) – slow, ponderous (heavy) = high – low (pitch);
3. a) high – low (space) = high – low (pitch);
rise – fall (space) = rise – fall (pitch);
b) line = sequence of pitches;
horizontal = duration of note;
wave-shape = trill or tremble;
4. a) clear – hazy = high – low (pitch);
b) glaring (shining) – pale, dull = strong – weak;
5. a) bright (white) – dark (black) = high – low (pitch);
b) warm – cold (also of colours) = high – low (pitch);
6. colourful – monochromic = sonorous – monotonous. 12
In the notation of music several of these archaic relics found their way in: high pitches are
above the stave, low pitches underneath. 13 Crescendos start with a narrow distance between
the lines which becomes bigger (small = soft, large = loud). Fast notes are normally also
notated more narrowly than slow ones, grace notes are especially small but also quarter notes
are smaller than half notes and half notes are again smaller than whole notes.
11 Ramachandran, V.S. and Hubbard, E.M.: “Synaesthesia – A Window Into Perception, Thought and Language”,
in: Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No.12, (2001), 6.
12 Wellek, Albert: Doppelempfinden und Programmusik, Vienna (1928), 75.
13 However, according to Robert Francès (La perception de la musique, Paris: Librairie philosophique (1958),
310), the association of pitches in space is not cross-cultural and is reversed in Greek, Arab and Jewish music. See
also: Nattiez, Jean-Jacques: Music and Discourse, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1990), 122.
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