Rethinking Auditory-Visual Synesthesia: A Case Study of Messiaen’s Synesthetic Behaviors

Abstract

Current existing scholarly researches on synesthetic music diverge into contrasting directions concerning color-hearing. One type of reference focuses on the theoretical analysis of sound-color correspondences in compositions. On the contrary, in opposition to restricted colorful delineation, the other type of research examines the synesthetic ideas in music from the interdisciplinary domain of musicology through a composer’s imaginative utilization of cross-modal examples. This article takes Messiaen’s music as the synesthetic example and elaborates on the different opinions between Jonathan Bernard’s sound-color correspondences and B. M. Galeyev’s interpretation of color-hearing. Based on Mikel Dufrenne’s “Phenomenology of the Aesthetic Experience” and Messiaen’s interviews, the article explains the leading cause of the divergence between Bernard and Galeyev’s aesthetic experience. Besides, this research conducts an experiment that informally requests a non-synesthete audience to report their first impression of listening to Messiaen’s synesthetic music. By observing the averaging response time of the participants, it proposes to rethink the meaning of visual-auditory synesthesia to the audience.