Yesterday I talked about the idea that certain colors (blue and red) could provide different types of motivation. The study concluded if you wanted to be more creative, surround yourself in a blue environment. For more detail oriented work, surround yourself in red.
After posting the article, @EricHeinzman and I had a brief conversation about it on on twitter, and he sent me the link to an article about seeing color in sound. The researcher in the article discusses a condition that he, and approximately 1% of the population has called Synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition that allows people to hear color when listening to certain noises.
Eric then posed the question: If certain colors induce particular mental states, and some people perceive colors in sounds (and vice-versa?), then wouldn’t it follow that sounds can have similar effects on mental states? He continued via email to me, saying “I think it makes sense if you break down colors and sounds into frequencies – sounds being defined as frequencies on the auditory spectrum, while colors are frequencies on the light spectrum. Given this, any color would theoretically have an auditory counterpart. For example, let’s say that A=440Hz harmonizes with blue. (I’m just using blue arbitrarily here – I haven’t done the research to determine whether the blue wavelengths of visible light are in fact the ones that correspond with A440.) Would the subjects in the study who were more creative in the presence of blue be similarly affected if A440 was piped in?”
After reading both the article and Eric’s thoughts, it left a lot of open questions. In discussing it with my husband, he noted that most frequencies of sound are impossible to hear by a human ear. The sound wavelengths are either too high or too low. This means that even if a ‘blue sounds frequency’ was piped through a system, our ears may not be able to detect it, therefore would have no effect on our creativity. But, it brings back the whole tree falling in the forest question… Is it possible that although we couldn’t ‘hear’ the blue sound, we would still be more creative because the sound is there?
What do you think? Is it reasonable to assume that a sound at the same wavelength of a color could cause the same creative or detail oriented behavior? Or if we can’t actually hear the sound, does it not exist, therefore, not affect us?
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Kirsten
