17

Sean Day:
In search of a means to explore

The question is the extent to which a synesthete’s synesthesia(e) will orientate his or
her actions and productions (artistic and otherwise).
I have three types of synesthesia. The first I will deal with here is the type in
which the various timbres of musical instruments each produce, for me, their own
unique synesthetic colors. I project these colors out in front of me spatially, any-
where from right in front of my nose to distances in excess of 50 meters, depending
upon the situation.
When I was about 17 or 18 years old (I am now 45), my main focus in life was
music composition, particularly on the large, orchestral scale. By that age, I had re-
ceived formal education towards playing percussion, organ, and piano, along with
music theory and basics of orchestration. I entered into university majoring in Music
Composition. My goal was to write large-scale jazz/rock-based orchestral pieces, à
la George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and Frank Zappa, using my synesthesia as a
guide towards orchestration.
And, thus, I immediately met with difficulties. I wanted to write pieces combin-
ing instruments whose sounds “looked” good to me in combination. However, the
more I pushed for this, the worse the sound and balance of the instruments would
become.
To give some examples: A traditional string orchestra is, of course, made up
primarily of bowed string instruments. All bowed string instruments produce synes-
thetic shades of brown, for me, from the light tan of violins to the rich dark reddish
browns of cellos to the almost black of the double-bass. So, having bowed strings as
a foundation means that I have shades of brown as a foundation. I never really liked
brown that much; I prefer other colors, such as red, orange, purple, or sometimes
green.
Brass instruments could bring in some reds, oranges or yellows. These could
sometimes contrast nicely with the brown strings. However, a general orchestration
rule (promoted by Rimsky-Korsakov and other expert orchestrators) is that the best
way to balance timbres between the brass and the strings is to use the French horn.
Now, unfortunately for me, the French horn synesthetically produces large sheets of
a very distinct orange-yellow (called “school bus yellow” in the US) which I truly
dislike, and which, simply, visibly sticks out and contrasts in an ugly way with
everything else. So, we could have some orchestral piece (Mahler, for instance)
where the horns are playing, sonically, very beautifully, and blending the brass per-
fectly with the stings, but, because they are there, for me, visibly, there would be
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these big ugly yellow sheets. So I would try to avoid French horns, which is a bad
idea.
The make it worst, I wanted to add in the colors I desired – purples, oranges,
pinks, light greens. The only instruments that produce purples, for me, are saxo-
phones, which are not traditional orchestral instruments. This was okay, though,
since I wanted to write jazz pieces anyway. However, I tend to dislike contrasts of
purple with brown (back in my late teens and early twenties, I had a very strong, vis-
ceral aversion to this color combination); so, if I had saxophones, I did not want any
strings. Which was another huge problem.
Where my colors did work was when I was playing in small jazz or rock groups,
during improvisational solos. Since my music synesthesia worked on the timbre of
the instrument, whatever instrument I was playing would consistently produce just
the same one color all the time I played it, providing that I did nothing to alter that.
So, very early on, I adopted two different styles, choosing which one to use depend-
ing upon the situation. With some pieces, the solo would have to be mainly just me
playing, so my goal was to try to alter the sound of my instrument as much as possi-
bly; for example, trying to tweak the pinkish purple of a vibraphone to be as dark
purple as I could get it. Obviously, this was easier on some instruments (such as
vibraphone or synthesizer) than on others (such as piano). The other style was to set
up my solos so that other instruments could come in with “stabs” and other little
“add ins”; thus, I would produce my instrument’s color, but in a way such that other
instruments could add flashes of their colors here and there. Such solos were one of
the few places where my synesthetic colors for music could, on occasion, really
work for me.
At the age of 20, I left the Music department at the university I was at, for many
other reasons than because of any complications with my synesthesia. However, by
that time, I realized that I could not use my synesthetic colors for timbres as a main
organizing principle for orchestrating my compositions. It simply would not work.
The more instruments (and I tend to want to use many different instruments for the
full sounds I want to produce), the further I get away from any goals I might have
regarding colors. I could either opt to combine colors, and produce totally unbal-
anced sounds in the style of P.D.Q. Bach, or I could write good, well-orchestrated
music that had no visual appeal to me.

I also have ‘smell to color’ and ‘taste to color’ synesthesiae, which brings us to the
next stage. About 5 years ago, when I was about 40 years old, I was contacted by a
researcher at a company that makes artificial and natural flavorings. This researcher,
a trained professional “nose” himself, wanted to explore whether my synesthesia
would give me any special “edge” towards identifying and discriminating between
flavors. I was intrigued by this myself, so I agreed to participate in ‘taste test’
experiments.
Unfortunately, apparently, one of the company’s major clients at the time was
looking towards improving its soft drink line, particularly its diet cola. I hate diet
colas. Not just because of the tastes, which I find to be, more often than not,
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unpleasant, but because of the synesthetic colors produced. Cola drinks usually
synesthetically produce, for me, a large oval (laid horizontally) of shades of blue,
with a black base, with tinges of pinks and sometimes green in the upper half. How-
ever, about half of all colas, as part of the colors they create, produce, in the upper
right-hand corner of my visual field, a patch of yellowish gray which can only be de-
scribed accurately as either “sweat-stain yellow” or, even more accurately, as “urine-
stain yellow”. I dislike yellow shades in general, but this particular shade is perhaps
the most unpleasant of all.
So, this company had me tasting various soft drinks, mainly colas, with differ-
ent balances of flavorings. It didn’t matter, though: all of the colas, which were their
prime focus, had the same underlying base diet cola flavoring, which produced that
inescapable yellow stain in the upper right-hand corner which I simply could not ig-
nore, no matter how hard I tried. Thus, no matter what flavor twists they tried (such
as lime, vanilla, clove, or artificial cinnamon), I would still end up with this dis-
gusted look on my face. More often than I could stop, I would audibly say “yuck” –
which is not attractive to company officials who are trying to maintain pride in their
major client’s current major focus item.
After about four or five separate sessions of this, we parted ways, perhaps a bit
less than amiably. I was rather disappointed. I felt that, with a bit more experience
and guided training, I probably could have honed my skills such that my synesthesia
would have become a useful asset towards discriminating flavors. However, I do see
the point from their side of things: I have no choice over what colors the flavors and
smells produce, and, sometimes, little choice regarding my automatic, visceral reac-
tions, which does not always make for good “public relations” with clients.

So, on to the next stage. Having seen that my orchestrating experiments did not
work out, and having played with being an amateur “nose” (or “tongue”?; or what-
ever) for a flavor company, I have now moved on to a different field of experimenta-
tion: cooking. This sort of emerged from small-scale, random things I would do with
certain foods that other people, such as my wife, noticed and brought to my attention
in a different light.
For example, one of my favorite food combinations is espresso coffee and
jalapeño peppers. Take a sip or two of espresso, then eat a jalapeño, and then wash
down the burn with another sip of espresso. The flavor combination is definitely an
“acquired taste”, and will usually give me a very upset stomach if I go too far. But I
do it for the synesthetic color combination. Coffee makes a dark oily green pool in
front of me, about eye-level and a little to the left, about the size of a dinner plate
seen face on. Jalapeño peppers produce synesthetic visuals of little tiny cut sapphires
and garnets or rubies. Combine these two, and you get a gorgeous mix of little blue
and red gemstones sparkling in green oil (it does look better than it sounds).
I guess my turn towards playing with cooking experiments came when I no-
ticed three different things: 1) My tendency to want ice cream shortly after having
eaten chicken or beef. 2) My fascination with having blue cheese or peanut butter on
a hamburger. 3) My love of combining ricotta cheese with spinach. When I stopped
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to take a look at the “why” of this (with perhaps more than a push or two from my
baffled wife), I realized that it was because if [= of?] the resulting synesthetic color
combinations produced. Beef makes me see a dark, full blue; chicken, a sky blue;
thus I wanted ice cream because that was another sky blue which complimented the
colors well. Similarly for blue cheese (which produces a nice purplish blue) on beef
(a full blue); peanut butter makes a dark grey which also balances nice with the blue
from beef. Spinach’s deep full purple balances perfectly with ricotta’s mild light
blue.
Thus, I’m discovering that, while trying to combine instruments by the colors
they produce never worked out for me as far as my music was concerned, sometimes
(albeit not all of the time), working my synesthetic colors for foods can produce
some very unique – and not bad-tasting – food combinations. One that received re-
cent attention in Australia was my concoction of chicken orange à la mode; that is, a
grilled, boneless chicken breast, topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, all cov-
ered with an orange sauce. For me, synesthetically, this is a gorgeous combination.
The flavor of chicken produces sky blue; ice cream, sky blue; vanilla, sky blue; and
orange, sky blue; but the shades are all just subtly different, such that there are dis-
tinctly four shades, blending into one another. The resulting combination is like a
painting by Maxfield Parish, exploring the most delicate distinctions of shades of
blue.
Different food flavors produce different colors for me, but about half of all such
colors I see are shades of blue, so it is sometimes difficult to escape from working
with blue as a base color or main component. However, I don’t dislike blue, or find
it boring, like I felt with the brown of bowed strings. At the moment, though, I seem
to have an urge to want to combine foods that produce shades of nearly the same
color. Right now, I’m somewhat fascinated with those that produce shades of orange
for me; this would mean, for example, combining different types of seafood (such as
salmon or squid) with berries (such as raspberries or cranberries) or nuts (such as al-
monds). However, I’m also moving into exploring contrasting orange foods (such as
salmon) with blue foods (such as cream) or purple foods (such as spinach or pump-
kin).
Having just started with this, I have no clue where it will lead. Until recently,
most of my cooking experiments have resulted in things that no one else was inter-
ested in trying. However, in the past three months, I have noticed that a Californian
chef, on his own and separately, concocted a chicken à la mode dish that went over
well at his restaurant; and, on a televised cooking show, a recipe for raspberry squid
was offered.
When I was trying to orchestrate music, I was trying to produce something sal-
able to the public, but discovered that my synesthetic colors just did not work for
that medium. Now, in the kitchen, I’m only playing around with my synesthetic col-
ors just for myself (although my wife is sometimes willing to try a bite of what I
produce, and even likes a couple of my recipes), but find that, apparently, sometimes
they can produce results that others have also found marketable.
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Will I go back and try to become a professional “nose” again? Perhaps; but, if
so, just for my own amusement. I have been contemplating whether I might want to
try to hone my skills towards using my synesthesia for wine-tasting, or perhaps for
teas, coffees, or cheeses. As to music, I have come to terms with my colored timbres
in the last decade, and now see how, instead of using them as a main theme for
orchestration, with focus on color combinations, I can use them as a factor in decid-
ing solo or duet passages. I’ve been rethinking some of my old compositions in
these terms.
But, at least for now, I don’t think I will give up my day job just yet.