Seeing music

I wish you could see music the way I do.

I got about one and half working eyeballs. One's freakin' great, and the other just kinda tags along for the ride. Most of the time. When I'm tired, it kinda does its own thing. This means that I'm one BB away from a seeing-eye dog and a white cane. Needless to say, I got a pretty raging blindness phobia, and I can't ever watch "Kill Bill Vol 2." again.

But where I got you beat, Eagle-Eye McGee, is how I see music, and very few people seem to know what I'm taking about, so I guess it's fairly rare.

Have you ever heard of a psychological condition known as synesthesia? Now you have, because you know me, and I've got it. It's nothing debilitating like schizophrenia, but it takes some explaining.

This is a condition often associated with savants, those fortunate few who possess a seemingly supernatural skill in one area. (Cool it, Smalls. A savant I ain't.) Often, these savants are referred to as idiot savants, like the Rain Man, who could memorize a whole phone book. The movie Rain Man is based on a real person, Kim Peek, and he can really do those things. Check him out on YouTube if you're bored.

Another example of savantism can be found in Daniel Tammet, a young Englishman whose astonishing skill with numbers allowed him to memorize pi to over 22,500 decimal places. It took him 5 hours of continuous recitation. He can also perform fascinatingly complex numbers in his head and carry them out to greater decimals that a laptop computer can. We're talking at least thirty decimal places here, folks.

I identify with Daniel Tammet because he's a synesthete too, though with him, it's numbers.

Here's how it works. A synesthete, such as Daniel, hears or sees a number on paper, and in his head, that number has color, texture. It is, in part, what allows him to work with numbers so personally. This has been proven clinically. Synesthetes in tests could repeatedly pick singular numbers, like 5's, out of a mishmash of 2's (in a particular typeface, such as the digital font made famous by computers in the 80's, 2 and 5 are mirror images of each other) because the 5's were green while all the 2's were red. They were all printed in black ink, of course, but to the synesthetes, that's how they saw them inside their minds.
It looks like this:

Synesthesia means a mating, a coupling, of one sense to another. For some, a smell might have certain color, or a taste might have a certain sound. For me, I see sounds as colors.

I drive people bonkers because, in the car, I'll slide my 'Blue' disc into the CD player. (Now, on the iPod, I just pull up a like-named playlist.) The 'Blue' disc contains what are, to me, blue songs. Not blues, but blue—songs in the key of D are blue. Songs in the key of G are purple. C is red, and E is golden. F is orange, and A is yellow, B-flat is yellowish-green, and B is St. Patrick's Day.

Do you get it? I hope so, because that's the best way I can think to explain it. This is why song lyrics mean little to nothing to me, and why I can never remember them, but I can play a song nearly flawlessly (on bass, the only instrument I can play worth a crap) after hearing it only a few times. You can give me a song title and I'll tell you what key it's in. I can hear the first few notes of a song and tell you what song it is before the vocals start. And, more importantly, this means that I have (almost) perfect pitch. You can play a note, and, more often then not, I'll tell you what note it is.

Where I'm going with this is what music does to me, inside my head. I catch a lot of flak from people at shows I'm attending, or when listening to stuff at a friend's house, because I listen with my eyes closed and then I get jumped on for falling asleep. It's true I can fall asleep anywhere, but if there's music playing, rest assured I'm wide awake.

I listen to music with my eyes closed because what's being created in my head is a hell of a lot more interesting than what's going on around me. The music paints such wonderful pictures, such vibrant colors, that I am gladly lost inside them. I'm particularly fond of songs in the key of D-flat, because those songs are a deep, deep indigo. Get to a chord change, however, and new colors appear, and the palette broadens. I wish I could show you.

It's not all roses. Songs in a minor key are always gray, which is why I'm lost in telling you what key a minor tune is in.

This is also why most (not all) jazz is lost on me, because there's no sense to it. It's a jangle of bright, clashing colors that don't paint anything I recognize. To me, listening to jazz is a lot like looking at a Jackson Pollack.

But when it works, oh, such beauty. And there are chords in songs that paint such fascinating pictures, or maybe are just such a beautiful blend of colors, that I'm speechless. I'll do my best to show you what I'm talking about.

In a previous post, I tried to show you what I saw in my head when I heard the word splendor. To illustrate this, I showed you this picture, of the ceiling in back of the altar in St. John the Baptist Church. Remember this?

Now, I want you to play "I Believe I can Fly," by R. Kelly. Fast forward it to the second half of the chorus:

I believe I can soar,/
I see me running through that open door/

On "soar," the change is an A-minor 7. But on "open," according to the chart, that chord is an F minor 6 with A-flat in the bass. If you're not a musician, that means nothing to you, but let me tell you that the colors I see in that chord look a lot like the ceiling over that altar, but…moving, shimmering, swimming, blues and golds and…

I'm at a loss for words, as I often am when listening to music. At least, words that would mean anything to you. But I love that song. And most of all, I love that chord. A very similar chord also appears in The Lion King's "The Circle of Life."

'Til we find our place/
On the path unwinding/

And right after "unwinding," there it is. This one's slightly different, because it's an E-flat minor 6 with a G-flat in the bass, but it looks the same. Except where R. Kelly's is blue, this one's green.

I wish you could see it like I do.