Sounding Color and Colorblindness
by Andrew Yan
It was a symphony of pianos. No strings, no brass, no woodwinds. Just dynamic pianos playing the composition pitch for pitch, melody for melody. But without brass or strings or woodwinds, could you really say the piece played by this strange symphony was the same?
The history of colorblindness is not about blindness; rather, it refers to the ability to match colors. Colorblindness is the decreased ability to perceive differences in color, which can be a hindrance. But who decides the palette?[1]
As historian Martin Jay claimed, we live in ocularcentric societies where vision is king, and color-perception is one of its many utilitarian usages.[2] Stop signs are eye-catching because of their bright red paint, and a golden-brown crust indicates a pie has just finished baking. But what and how much is left out of the visual world? Color “mis-” matching had famously fascinated neurologist Oliver Sacks. In 1993, he traveled to the island of Pingelap, where a tenth of the population suffered from achromatopsia, a rare form of colorblindness in which the world appears in shades of gray. He asked the natives, “How can you folk tell when a banana’s ripe? You can’t distinguish between green and yellow.”[3] In response, the natives brought a green banana – one perfectly ripe. “You’re narrow minded,” they said, “You just used color as a criterion. We used everything.”[4]
We place so much emphasis on vision, we forget that it is misguided. In cases of colorblindness, how do other senses make up for a “lacking” of color? In visual art, colors are agents of emotion. In music, they are melodies and sounds. Here we have two different agents of emotion from different senses, but can sound and color adequately respond to each other and reveal what is left out in a world of vision?
PART 1: INTRODUCTION
PART 2: REVEAL
Works Cited:
Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rossi, M. 2019. The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America. University of Chicago Press.
“Oliver Sacks on Ripe Bananas,” YouTube video, 2:59, “Blank on Blank.”
Audio transcript:
It was a symphony of pianos. But what does a symphony of pianos sound like? Obviously, it would not sound like a “normal” symphony, but if both symphonies played the same piece, could they still invoke the same emotions?
Colorblindness isn’t really blindness. Someone who is colorblind has a harder time distinguishing between different hues. This can be a hinderance since color is used often in everyday life. For instance, stop signs are painted bright red to grab a driver’s attention.
But because we place so much emphasis on color and sight, we sometimes forget about what it leaves out. Neurologist Oliver Sacks once asked some natives with total colorblindness from the Island of Pingelap how they could tell if a banana were ripe if they couldn’t see its color. They showed Sacks a green banana, but it was perfectly ripe. “You just used color as a criterion. We used everything.”
Sacks unconsciously thought total colorblindness, or achromatopsia, was a limitation, but it was the ability to see color that limited him. So what is left out in a world of vision and color, and how can other sensations make up for when vision fails? For instance, in visual art, when colors are deliberately chosen by an artist to convey specific emotions, how can someone with achromatopsia experience all those emotions if they can’t see colors?
In terms of emotional capabilities, sound can be just as powerful as vision. Melodies that make up music can also convey emotion like colors can in art. In that case, is there a way for music to sound the colors that aren’t perceived and vice versa?
For the next four minutes, I will try to respond an improvised piano piece my friend made by turning it into something visual using oil pastels. I will try to capture sensations I felt while listening to the piece using visual art, but you won’t be able to see any colors until the end. If you wish to hear only the music, please put on headphones and only listen through the left earbud. I will describe what I’m feeling, what I’m drawing and why, and my reflection on this process through the right earbud.
My first reaction to part you just heard was, “This sounds like stars or fireflies,” so I decided that at some one of the two would be a part of this picture.
From here, this part of the song makes me think of night, so I decided to add stars over fireflies. It also is tranquil, but it feels like I’m waiting for something.
Here, there is a slight shift in tempo at this point of the song, and the song becomes more aggressive and frantic, like a shift from a calm lake to a stormy sea of some sort.
The song overall is very lively, from the beginning throughout until the very end. I think I’m going to try to represent this through more solid and vibrant colors. You can’t actually see that right now but in the end it should look a little more vibrant.
From this point forward returns to a more tranquil feeling, It’s still lively but it’s not aggressive anymore, and it seems very hopeful like the worst has passed. I think I want to symbolize this by incorporating a sunrise because a sunrise is generally very bright and sort of a new beginning, so dawn is very hopeful.
The rest of this piece also just wants me to walk alongside a shoreline or on a beach. So I think I will make my piece a sunrise on a beach with stars in the night sky.
Here, I am finally adding the stars that I mentioned in the beginning. It’s interesting because if I were to do this in order, I would have put the stars down first and everything else after. But the thing is, sound is very temporal. It’s very hard to look at the entire piece because it’s so in the moment. A picture is very stagnant, it does not change over time very easily, so I tried to take the entire piece (the song) as a whole and draw my reaction to that rather than just by step by step.
(silence)
And this is my final representation of my friend’s piece. A night sky with many multicolored stars, an orange and pink dawn coming off over the horizon over blue waves crashing down on a beach.
[1] In his book The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America, Michael Rossi discusses the history of color blindness. Today, culture is often used as an overarching structure for evaluating color, but in the 18th century, color was a lens used to evaluate culture (Rossi 117-118). Ophthalmologist Hugo Magnus attempted to use color acuity among Native American tribes to evaluate how civilized they were compared to other cultures like that of the west (116). Initially, Native Americans were thought to have worse color acuity because many tribes did not have stable words for certain colors such as green (125). However, other studies showed that colorblindness was higher among white males than males of other races and all females, which led scholars to claim colorblindness was actually a sign of progress (127). However, Franz Boas’s theory on cultural relativism provided a new avenue for discussing color: that perceptions of color were arbitrary classifications of reality than fact (145). Everyone sees the same color (and by extension classifies the same reality) in different ways according to their understanding of the world (145).
[2] Martin Jay, Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 3.
[3] “Oliver Sacks on Ripe Bananas,” YouTube video, 2:59, “Blank on Blank.”
[4] Ibid, 3:26.