Bono has long talked about looking for new colors in music, but watching this (4:30 mark), he really sounds like he's got synesthesia (see posts on that topic below)..it's a a fairly common form of it where the listener hears/sees notes as colors..
of course, "Jesus had holy synesthesia and wants to infect us with it:
(Note: sometimes the embed below is not working great, so you can also watch it here..2nd video)
Great sound. What's interesting is he talked about "brown" sounds as though the concept could be caught by others, and it seems quite common for musicians to talk about sounds in terms that are new or related to other things just to get a feel or sensation for the sound. It's almost as though the written sheet music were a form of mathematics but something about the performance of it were more akin to a painting, perhaps more of an impressionist form of art with spotches of color. For a long time, I felt as though Rod Stewart's music often painted a feeling of being in some place with an ambiance that could be felt or almost seen as much as heard, as if his music were paintings of a sort. I've felt this way about various musicians, but not all musicians. It's strange that the mind can work that way sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI actually have a bit of synthesia myself, I just didn't know the term for it. I've been describing music in terms of color and visual stimuli for as long as I can remember.
ReplyDeleteDan and Mike...awesome comments
ReplyDeleteDan, the ambience comment is intriguing
Mike, it's fairly common among artistic types..
i had a worship leader who was color-blind, but when he wrote or played music, he "saw" each note a different color..the cool thing is this all works out with brain correspondence..it's not random