Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 1, April 2008
___________________________________________________________________
Jewanski, Jörg/Sidler, Natalia (eds.): Farbe – Licht – Musik. Synästhesie und Farblichtmusik. Bern: Peter Lang 2006 (Zürcher Musikstudien Bd. 6), ISBN 3-03910-636-8, € 71.60/₤ 50.10
Reviewed by
The cognitive phenomenon of synaesthesia experiences increasing attention not only in the special scientific fields of cognitive and psychological research but also in the humanities. Genuine synaesthetes have at least two different cognitive sensations triggered by only one sensual stimulus. The most common form of synaesthesia is the colour-synaesthesia – seeing for instance coloured letters where black letters appear on paper – followed by the sound-colour-synaesthesia, when poeple experience colours while hearing music or sounds (see the contribution of Sean A. Day in the reviewed volume). Genuine synaesthetes cannot control these perceptions – they appear unwillingly and remain constant in their assignment. That means that for instance in the case of coloured-letter-perception the colours assigned to the letters remain constant throughout the years. In contrast to this „rigid“ definition of synaesthesia, the humanities use the notion in a far broader meaning as they include all representations of combining different sensual experiences (like most prominently performed in literary metaphors) although they increasingly pay attention to to cognitive synaesthesia as the reviewed volume shows.
Interestingly enough the research on cognitive synaesthesia seems to be culturally linked to an intensified turn towards multimedia art experiments. In Germany the psychological research on synaesthesia reached its first peak in the 1920ies, during the high time of the early avantgarde-movements where the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork) experienced a second climax with Bauhaus, Dada-Performances and new ways of theatrical performance. Since the 1980ies synaesthesia again became the object of psychological and neurological research in the US (Richard Cytowic), the UK (Simon Baron-Cohen) and in Germany (Hinderk Emrich). At that time new forms of art developed which lead from video installation to computerbased multimedia interactive art forms – a tendency to combine different forms of art and by this to challenge the sensual perception of the audience in luring them into an multisensual environment which often can be experienced with the whole body.
The interconnection between multisensory perception and multimedia art therefore seems to be one implicit root for the volume „Farbe – Licht – Musik. Synästhesie und Farblichtmusik“ („Colour – Light – Music. Synaesthesia and Colourlightmusic“) which examines the interrelation of music and visual sensations/visual arts from two different perspectives: The first starting point is the phenomenon of sound-colour synaesthesia, which is explored by two contributions on synaesthesia in general (by Sean A. Day, who himself is a synaesthete and founder of the us-synaesthete mailing-list, and by the engineer Michael Haverkamp) and by reports of sound-colour-synaesthetes on their sensations. Especially these reports in their subjectivity are quite illuminative as they illustrate the complexity of synaesthesia. Mostly synaesthetes not only see colours but coloured three-dimensional forms in motion, especially when hearing music – the visual sensations mirror the time-based dynamic character of sensual stimulus. The intensity of synaesthetic feelings also depends of the momentary psychic disposition: in situations of high tension and concentration, some synaesthetes report, their synaesthetic perceptions are weaker while being relaxed they intensify. Synaesthesia obviously is not only a question of neuronal circuits between the different centers for the processing of sensual data, but also of other brain regions like the limbic system which is responsible for emotions. The reports also show, that psychological research on synaesthesia often simplifies the sensations as it uses simple assignments of colours while synaesthetes report complex visions of floating forms and colours. With this subjective reports, accompanied by computer-generated pictures which simulate synaesthete sensations, the volume delivers an informative range of the complexity of synaesthetic perception.
The second starting point to explore the different phenomena of colour-music-interplay is the aesthetic one. Jörg Jewanski‘s very informative article on the history of colour-music experiments and the related scientific discussions starting from Aristotle and reaching to the 1920ies opens new perspectives on the field of multimedia art experiments and their cultural background. Drawing parallels between colour and sound has a long tradition although the motivation for combining these different phenomena change throughout history. As long as the paradigm of a cosmological harmony lasted, colour, light and sound where part of the holistic cosmic system where all elements were linked together (140). With the increasing dominance of modern scientific thinking the relation between colour and sound had to be explained by constructing parallels between e.g. the physical measurement of waves and frequences after Thomas Young was able to calculate the wave length of light at the beginning of the 19th century (163 ff.). In between these different explanation horizons lie several artistic experiments with the combination of light/colour and music beginning with the ocular harpsicord built by Louis Bertrand Castel in the 18th century. This instrument linked the piano keyboard to a light mechanism consisting of candles and coloured glass. Although this experiment was dismissed as absurd in the aesthetic discussion of the late 18th century (for example by Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), the tendency to build ocular music instruments continued – in the 19th century it was Alexander Wallace Rimington who introduced an ocular piano while at the time of the first avantgarde movements also composers like Alexander Skrjabin with his „Prometheus“ and Alexander László with a further development of a colour-music-instrument turned to the experimental field of combining sound and colour. Jewanski‘s further focus, especially in his second extensive contribution for this volume, lies on Alexander László‘s work on the colour-light-music (Farblichtmusik).
László, a Hungarian composer who had worked in Germany before WW II, then emigrated to the United States, declared the colour-light-music as main aim of his artistic work. His motivation had different roots: From a subjective angle, he wanted to visualize his own sensations he had when hearing music, but apart from that he was also deeply rooted in the aesthetic aims of abstract painting and abstract film. The analysis of Jewanski is complemented by so far unpublished documents of László. They reveal that László‘s aesthetic motivation to combine sound art and visual arts was not to mingle their structures to an aesthetic whole, but to allow painting to become absolute abstract (implicitly: turning away from reality and cultivating pure form and colour), while music could enfold its already abstract character. László insists on the independence of the aesthetic quality of music and visual arts also for his own works although some structural elements of music like melody, harmony and rhythm are transmitted to the visual design for his colour-light-music. Inspiring and intensifying the sensual perception of the audience was another important aim László tried to realize. Apart from the subjective character of the colour-music-combination László implicitly tried to give his experiments a scientific basis in combining the circle of fifths with the colour circle of Wilhelm Ostwald – an interconnection which might be arbitrary but which allows a certain transperancy for audience and researchers in reconstructing László‘s aesthetic approach.
The third part of the volume deals with the reconstruction of László‘s „sonatina for piano and colourlight op. 11“ (Sonatina für Klavier und Farblicht op. 11) which was performed in 2004 and used modern computer technology to generate visual effects that only partly referred to László‘s original intentions (as far as they can be reconstructed). In the course of this performance non-synaesthete and synaesthete artists were asked to visualize their imagination when hearing the sonatina – the results are presented in the third part. They reveal a methodological core problem in dealing with such intermedia artistic production: The non-synaesthete artists use their diffuse emotional feelings generated by the sonatina as artistic inspiration for the music‘s visualization, while the synaesthetes try to mirror their visual sensations triggered by music. But for an analysis of the artistic „product“ the knowledge about synaesthesia and non-synaesthesia of the artists seems to be not at all relevant. Much more important for the recipient and the researcher is the question of the structural interrelation between music and visual arts. Here, visualizing subjective emotions or sensations does not contribute to the deeper understanding of the musical piece, as Hajo Düchting critically states in his comment (406), mainly because the visualizations do not show any structural connection with the music (e.g. in transferring musical structures into visual art) and therefore remain purely subjective – a critique which many of the earlier colour-music-experiments had to face.
The volume closes with the description of a contemporary project by the musician and painter Natalia Sidler who works on a modern, computer based colour-light piano – a project that, like László‘s early attempts, focuses on the visual rather than on music. In her description Sidler emphasizes the need to compose especially for the newly constructed instrument, a demand which reveals the problem of the oscillation between preserving the autonomy of the combined arts and the construction of a coherent interplay between the acoustic and the visual. The question remains open if audio-visual artistic interconnections have the power to generate a new genre or whether they remain in the status of a casual experiment. It also remains open on which aesthetic and perceptional premises multimedia experiments can rely to reach beyond the realm of pure subjective associations – this seems to be one crucial problem not only for colour-sound-experiments but for all multimedia art.
„Farbe – Licht – Musik“ is an unconventional publication as it combines academic research with the description of artistic experiments and the subjective reports of synaesthetes. Therefore it interrelates two different fields: the cognitive phenomenon of synaesthesia which is part of psychological/neurophysiological research, and the aesthetic field of audio-visual artistic experiments. The problem with this lies in the only loose relation between a special form of perception and the question of combining different artistic media. As Jewanski himself points out, synaesthesia is no valuable aesthetic category: neither for the recipient nor for the researcher it is of any use to speculate whether an artist was synaesthete (as often is claimed for Kandinsky and Skrjabin for example) or not (188/89). Jewanski‘s argument, that the synaesthesia of an artist becomes aesthetically interesting when it influences his creative work (189) seems to lack methodological depth: Every artist is influenced by multiple factors, synaesthesia might therefore be only one among others. Focusing on synaesthesia as motivation for art production risks to reduce this complex process to only one cause.
Although the methodological difficulties of speculating on synaesthesia in analyzing the work of artists are often repeated in the academic contributions, one focus of the volume lies precisely in this interrelation. This leads to a structural paradox, because the critical remarks implicitly subvert the approach of linking synaesthesia to artistic production. This paradox shows at least that aesthetic perception (be it synaesthetic or not) and the analysis of art works/art production are two different fields that are deeply interconnected but seem to demand different methodological approaches. Two seperate problems are addressed by this point: Firstly the question arises, how multimodal sensual perception which is triggered not only by vision-sound experiments but by any multimedia art, and the analysis of multimedia/intermedia art works can be methodologically combined. Secondly the role of specific sensual perception modes as a root for artistic creativity still lacks academic attention when analyzing artistic production processes, also because such a research focus mostly has to deal with individual experiences rather than with processes that allow to construct generalized patterns. Both questions are still unresolved problems of art and media research and remain crucial challenges for future research.
Despite these remarks which are made from my point of view as a researcher, „Farbe – Licht – Musik“ is an instructive, inspiring publication on the history and presence of audio-visual artistic experiments and on the question of synaesthesia. Not only in its contributions, but also in its expensive design with numerous colour illustrations that contribute to the transparency of the objects in question it is a recommendable reading for everyone who is interested in multimedia art and its history.