I wonder what color synaesthesiacs see when they hear the blues?

Do they really see blue? What about the red-hot notes of a searing guitar solo? Or maybe the orange tones of the tenor sax? How about that thin wild mercury Bob Dylan speaks about when he describes the shimmering silver gold sound he sought for Blonde on Blonde? When it didn’t work, do you think he heard tin or mustard?

Laugh if you want, but maybe we’re on to something here. Scientists are discovering that some people may perceive light and sound vibrations with multiple senses. Mistakenly thought of as a sensory crossover defect, people with this ability may actually be perceiving a much richer sensory experience of real processes and material phenomena than those who do not have this ability. They see the vibrations of sound and hear the vibrations of color, something that is not too far off from the recent attempts to describe the actual physical phenomena that is producing these effects.

Of course I speak of the search for a unified field theory particularly that of string theory which advances the idea that there are smaller components to the universe than atoms, called strings, which vibrate and interact with other strings, to create the fabric of existence. This means that if synaesthesia is more than just a crossover sensory experience but a heightened sensory ability to perceive physical phenomena with multiple senses, we have on our planet people who may become key to better understanding the process of existence itself because they can actually see, hear, taste, smell or feel the world around more precisely and with more detail than the rest of us.

Who are the synaesthesiacs among us? I do not think most synaesthesiacs even know who they are. The world they live in seems just as normal to them as ours does to us. And we all assume everyone else is like us. But my guess is that they probably gravitate toward creative endeavors and those that have talked about or used it in song such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa are, or at least were, candidates of such awareness.

Bob once sought what he called a thin wild mercury sound in his music. As he told a Playboy interviewer in 1977: "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound."

While he saw his sound as a color, he also used color in his lyrics. His use of color in this way was evident in the opening verse of My Back pages:

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin' high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps

He also mentioned the power of colors in Lay Lady Lay:

Whatever colors you have in your mind
I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine

And of course who could forget the imagery in Tangled Up In Blue?

Early one mornin' the sun was shinin',
I was layin' in bed
Wond'rin' if she'd changed at all
If her hair was still red.
Her folks they said our lives together
Sure was gonna be rough
They never did like Mama's homemade dress
Papa's bankbook wasn't big enough.
And I was standin' on the side of the road
Rain fallin' on my shoes
Heading out for the East Coast
Lord knows I've paid some dues gettin' through,
Tangled up in blue.

Funny thing is, some people know exactly what he's talking about and some don't. I'd like to compile a list of Bob Dylan songs in which he refers to colors or uses it in his imagery, especially as it relates to sound. Perhaps Bob shares certain synaesthesiatic abilities with a percentage of the population and is knowingly or unknowingly communicating with us on yet another level.

One of his oft-used songs like She Belongs To Me?

She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black.

Curious: If Bob played the blues with the shimmery gold sound of his wild mercury days, what color did he make?

I am particularly interested in this color and sound crossover effect called synaesthesia.

For instance, the use of white and black in Black Diamond Bay may harken to the checkerboard organization of a colonial island port town and support the lyrics with imagery but I am not sure that Bob is using black and white tones in the song. Someone please let me know if they hear black and white.

At least not like "Crimson flames tied through my ears," an obvious reference to the crossover of three senses, "Using ideas as my maps." What lines!

You know, Jimi Hendirx's avowed mission in making Rainbow Bridge was to make people hear color and see sound. It's right there in the liner notes. But at the time people thought it was either drugs or mysticism. Now they know this phenomena is real and they call it synaesthesia.

Interesting. It's not clear that Dylan is a synaesthete, but there are synaesthetic-like references to color in his work. Seeing colors when one hears sounds and using color in lyrics are two different things unless those lyrics represent the colors one claims to see when hearing sounds. It's well known that one of Dylan's influences, Artur Rimbaud, was a synesthete. He even wrote a poem, "Voyelles" or "Vowels," that expressed such a correspondence:

Vowels

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
which buzz around cruel smells,

Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
in anger or in the raptures of penitence;

U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
the peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;

O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
silences crossed by [Worlds and by Angels]:
–O the Omega! the violet ray of [His] Eyes!

ABC Prime Time had a segment on synaesthesia a couple of years ago and there's a fair amount of research going on in perception labs around the world. I guess the only way to determine if Dylan has this gift would be to ask him. Perhaps he'd be willing to discuss it on a future "Colors" Theme-Time Radio Hour program.

Now for the challenge: See if this is really real and help me compile a list of songs that use synaesthesiac color sound references to communicate. For instance, Bob hits his sound when he sings in Rollin’ and Tumblin’:

The landscape is glowin', gleamin' in the golden light of day
The landscape is glowin', gleamin' in the golden light of day
I ain't holding nothin' back now, I ain't standin' in anybody's way