Hearing Music in Color: The Case of Pianist, Composer, and Synesthete, Amy Beach Synesthesia, a perceptive disorder that involves the cross-modal interpretation of different senses, is surprisingly prevalent in a number of famous artists and musicians, now and throughout history. One of these musicians was Amy Beach (1867-1944), a professional pianist and composer whose synesthesia highly influenced her choice of keys and modes within her writing. Synesthesia Synesthesia is a neurophysiological condition in which a sensory stimulation leads to a secondary perception in another sensory modality. “Synesthesia” comes from the ancient Greek words syn (joining) and aisthēsis (sensation) (Mikuš, 2013). There are two primary forms of synesthetic perception: synesthesia between the senses and synesthesia between senses and concepts (Williams, 2015). The most common manifestations of synesthesia are grapheme-color, tone/voice-color, and number forms, but there …show more content…
However, researchers have developed a set of criteria that embody the primary characteristics of true synesthesia. These five criteria are as follows: 1) synesthesia is involuntary and automatic; 2) synesthetic perceptions are consistent and simple; 3) synesthesia is memorable; 4) synesthesia is spatially extended; and 5) synesthesia is imbued by emotions (Mikuš, 2013). Amy Beach Born September 5, 1867 in Henniker, New Hampshire, Amy Marcy Beach (maiden- Cheney) lived in a time when female performers were considered improper and, as such, her husband encouraged Amy to focus her talents on composing rather than performing. A prolific female composer, Amy Beach wrote over 300 compositions, including the first-ever symphony written by a woman. Beach’s synesthesia influenced many of her compositions throughout her life, especially her small-scale works for piano and/or voice (Logan, 2015). Amy Beach’s
In this paper, I will argue that it is more likely that the qualia of colour could be explained by physicalism rather than by property dualism. Qualia are subjective experiences, such as our senses (pg. 3). Physicalism views every property as physical, and can be explained by science (pg. 29). Property dualism refers to the philosophical view that minds are made out of one substance, but contain physical properties, and a non-physical mind (qualia) that are not related to each other (pg. 29).
In this essay I outline Casey O’Callaghan’s liberal view of multimodality. I suggest that our current understanding does not justify such an extensive view on the multimodality of the senses, and I critique his stance on the prevalence of crossmodal interactions between the senses as an over interpretation of the current experimental data. I argue for a more conservative account of crossmodal interactions between the senses, and hypothesize that perception is best described in terms of distributions. To support this hypothesis, I provide evidence in the form of Jonathan Cohen’s account of synesthesia.
Clara Schumann was a concert pianist born to Frederick Wieck and Marianne Tromlitz in Leipzig, Germany on September 13, 1819 (Comminfo). Clara was the second of five children and the daughter of a prominent music teacher and piano proprietor (Friedrich Wieck) and an opera soprano singer (Marianne Tromlitz). She died in 1896, renowned as a classical pianist and composer in the nineteenth-century Romantic style. During her height of popularity, the press deemed Clara as the “Queen of the Piano” (Schumann, Clara [Josehpine], The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music).
Now suppose that the next time I heard guitar music, I failed to perceive a soft brushing sensation around my ankles. It would not bother me a bit. But for Carol Crane, a guitar that didn't affect her ankles might provoke the same sort of confusion and anxiety an invisible cat would induce in me. To Crane, the ankle-brushing sensation has always been an integral part of guitar music, just as violins always act upon her face and trumpets on the back of her neck. Crane has a rare condition called synesthesia, in which a stimulus usually perceived in one sensory modality produces a sensation in one or more other sensory modalities. (1).
Amy Beach is a favored women’s musician and composer and was known as a child prodigy. She was one of few women who pursued music in her period. Amy was mostly known for her solo performances and continued to amaze the world with her impenetrable style of music. Amy was a very successful artist with the help of her parents and family members. Her mother and father put her in musical training when she was six, and her career took off from there. She was famously known for being a pianist and a composer with over twenty musical pieces.
The brilliant composer Clara Schumann was born as Clara Josephine Wieck on 13 September 1819. Even before her birth, her destiny was to become a famous musician. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a piano teacher and music dealer, while her mother, Marianne Wieck, was a soprano and a concert pianist and her family was very musically gifted. Her father, Friedrich, wanted to prove to the world that his teaching methods could produce a famous pianist, so he decided, before Clara’s birth, that she would become that pianist. Clara’s father’s wish came true, as his daughter ended up becoming a child prodigy and one of the most famous female composers of her time.
She played a concert in 1883 at the Music Hall in Boston at the age of 16. According to the article, “Synesthesia and Feminism: a Case Study on Amy Beach (1867-1944), author Jeremy Logan (2015) talks about Amy’s success as a young composer and states “Amy Marcy Cheney debuted as a professional concert pianist in Boston on 21 October 1883, playing Ignaz Moscheles’ G minor Concerto and Chopins Rondo in E. Adolf Neuendorff (1843-1897) conducted her debut performance” (p. 131). She shocked the crowd with her talent and was praised highly for being talented with the piano. Then her career grew from there. She then joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra. According to the book New Historical Anthology of Music by Women, author James R. Briscoe (2004) discusses Amy’s performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and says “In 1885, a momentous year for her, Amy Cheney played for the first time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, began a lifetime association with the music publisher, Author P. Schmidt” (p. 198). She performed Chopin’s F minor Concerto at the first concert she conducted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She continued to play with them for several shows until she married Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885. He did not particularly like Amy performing concerts and asked her to stop performing concerts. He only allowed her to perform for charity events. He didn’t believe that Amy had to keep
Renner, T., Feldman, R., Majors, M., Morrissey, J., & Mae, L. (2011). States of Consciousness. Psychsmart (pp. 99-107). New York: McGraw-Hill.
The perception of the world of someone with synesthesia is a world unlike any other. There’s many different variations of synesthesia, causing each synesthete to experience their everyday lives differently. How does this phenomenon work? Does this interesting way of seeing the world lead to a more artistic lifestyle?
Our five senses –sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch help the ways in which we perceive the world around us. And while they seem to work independently at time they can effect each other and the way we comprehend something. Seeing something pretty, touching something soft, eating something cold and smelling something rotten are the sense we use to connect with the world around us and will all effect how we move forward in that situation. When you look at the top picture say the color of the word not the word itself. It is harder than it seems and takes a little practice to do it efficiently. It is because we see the spelling we were taught not the color it was written in. It is hard to process it the other way, but not impossible. Take the bottom picture for another example is this a
For example, he argues, that the experience of temperature can be understood with the analogy of the experience of pain, and just as the pain is not 'in the needle', so the warmth I feel is not in the fire. (2) He then argues in a similar vein that visual experience is reducible to collections of colour sensations because light passes into the eye ball and strikes the retina, in much the same way that a sharp object striking the skin produces a sensation of pain, such as a sensation of blue or red. (3) The sensation being the effect of the physical and chemical properties of the world on the sense organs and is as distinct from the world as photographic images are from the objects which cause them.
To begin with, Derek Paravicini was born extremely prematurely, at 25 weeks. His blindness was caused by oxygen therapy given during his time in a neonatal intensive care unit. This also affected his developing brain, resulting in his severe learning disability. He also has autism. He is able to play piano only by listening to a piece of music once; his brain is perfectly programed musical computer (Extraordinary People, 2013).Moreover, although Tommy McHugh 51 was criminal and drug addict, he had a brain hemorrhage which underwent a serious surgery because both sides of his brain bleeding. But he made it. Suddenly, he began to write poetry out of his control as he put it, “The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write, it was like a drug.” McHugh spent every moment painting for 19 hours a day, he painted every surface such as wall, ceiling, and floor of his home .According to a neuroscientist who has studied McHugh, the brain hemorrhage flooded his frontal lobe with blood, which is responsible for creativity. In addition, Daniel Tammet was born with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome. His brain is able to reciting the number pi up to the 22,514th digit. He is also diagnosed with synesthesia that curious crossing of the senses that causes him to “hear” colors, “smell” sounds, in different shapes, and textures. Synesthesia is incredibly rare (Tammet,
Visual perception and visual sensation are both interactive processes, although there is a significant difference between the two processes. Sensation is defined as the stimulation of sense organs Visual sensation is a physiological process which means that it is the same for everyone. We absorb energy such as electro magnetic energy (light) or sound waves by sensory organs such as eyes. This energy is then transduced into electro chemical energy by the cones and rods (receptor cells) in the retina. There are four main stages of sensation. Sensation involves detection of stimuli incoming from the surrounding world, registering of the stimulus by the receptor cells, transduction or changing of the stimulus energy to an electric nerve impulse, and then finally the transmission of that electrical impulse into the brain. Our brain then perceives what the information is. Hence perception is defined as the selection, organisation and interpretation of that sensory input.
There are many of types of counseling in the world that are used often and then there are few that are used not so often, just because it is called therapy does not mean that the person is just in a room laying on a couch and talking to someone who keeps asking the same question “and how does that make you feel.” like we see on the television, There are therapies other than just in a room talking to someone; There are some in which people can do exercise, children can play games, they could even do group activities, just because someone is in counseling does not mean that they are confined to four walls and a note pad. The forms of therapy which will be focused on are Art and Music therapy, starting with art.
With physiological illusions, the brain presumes that the image is an effect of excessive interaction or stimulation of a physical stimulus. This stimulus can be either competing or contextual of a particular aspect of color, brightness, size, movement, etc. (Sincero, 2013) Physiological illusions can happen when a person is in an area with bright lights. When the lights are switched off, the person can still feel the effect of the light for a moment.