Some of you might already know what it is, and others might think it is made up. Some people hear music but see colors. Not metaphorically either. And sure, it sounds like a little bit of magic. Sound enters the ears, but the brain generates a color experience for the person listening. And it is completely involuntary. Just as involuntary as our brains manufacturing bass that isn't there.

Chromaesthesia. It's a subtype of synesthesia. You might have heard of grapheme-color synesthesia, where letters and numbers have a specific color. Chromaesthesia is the same, almost. The difference is it works with timbre, notes, chords, and music in general. Colors arrive with it. Pretty cool.

A Hungarian composer, Franz Liszt, used to tell his orchestra to play bluer or not so rosy. He was not being abstract. He was literally seeing colors as he conducted and trying to get the music to match. His orchestra thought he was losing it. He wasn't.

Amy Beach had a color for every key. F sharp was red. D major was yellow. C major was white. Not roughly. Exactly. Every time. Her whole life. And we don’t know if we are jealous or not, but it sounds like it brings music to life in a whole new way.

Pharrell has said he sees colors as geometric shapes when he hears music. Kanye has talked about it openly. Pianos are blue to him. Bass and snares are white. Bass lines are dark brown, dark purple. Every video he makes has to match the colors he is already hearing in his head. Frank Ocean has talked about the color of specific chords. Billy Joel says his moods have colors and his music follows them. To them it is just how music works.

But you don't need to have synesthesia to hear in color.

Studies show that people, with or without it, associate notes or entire tracks with specific colors. That means you and we can do it too.

Studies find that most people will describe certain sounds 'feeling' like certain colors. We'll call a track dark, moody, bright, or notes as warm or cool. We're mapping the music in all of these instances. What synesthesia does is make that mapping explicit, automatic, and specific. What the rest of us have is softer than that, but it is still there. The same brain wiring. Just turned down (a lot).

When you call music dark, you're not thinking yellow and orange; you're thinking purples, blacks, dark blues. If you meant to or not doesn't matter; the association is there.

The cool thing is that this is all still being studied. The working theory connects to the same cross-modal processing that produces the missing fundamental. If you missed that one, Involuntary Hallucination is worth a read. Your brain does not experience sound and vision in completely separate rooms. They bleed into each other. Sound triggers visual cortex activity in synesthetes, but mild activation of the same areas happens in everyone. The threshold is just different.

Which means the gap between a synesthete hearing D minor as deep blue and you thinking a Miles Davis track feels blue is smaller than you might think.

For the doers who are reading this, it is a great opportunity to grab some colored markers or pencils, grab a free download of coloring sheets, and see what happens.

Press play on the accompanying playlist, close your eyes for a few seconds, and when you're ready, open your eyes and grab the color you're feeling.

When we took part in this short class at Warner Music, people were seeing full landscapes of colors and replicating them on paper. Some saw beaches, others saw red peppers and tomatoes. For some, it was a flat color. The interesting part was when people pulled in personal experiences with the music we heard, and that changed the colors they reached for.

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