"What Music was going on in your head, while you were analyzing the painting?"
Usually the first response would be that of shock, "Music? I thought we were talking about colors here!" Some of them had to take a while to be able to let the idea sink in. What was interesting is the variety of answers that I got from them, and what aspect of the painting that they identified the music with; some students would try to imagine the sounds that may have taken place in the scene painted and just see what music fits best with the scene, others looked at it like a film scoring method and identified the general mood that the painting conveys and adds the score that depicts that mood, others responded more to colors, others to quality and character of the lines and brush strokes, some identified them with actually music pieces, some to genres, and some to instruments, and some students just didn't get it and couldn't make any connections whatsoever. The paintings used were of my favorite painters: Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso, Dali, Giger, Da Vinci...among others.
The idea of the association between music and art came upon me in high school, when a particular painting of an abstraction of a landscape that I have been working on prompted a comment that it "felt" like ballet "swan lake". I was very intrigued by the comment, especially because I was listening to alot of swan lake at the time. I felt that some of the expressive elements of Tchaikovsky's masterpiece that resonated within me was manifested in the painting I was focused on. At that point of time, I believe that architecture and music could also be related, and I have since (eight years now) been pondering and wondering about it.
Years later, while taking Professor Peter Noonan's seminar " Sensing Architecture: Body and Place", the class was introduced to the phenomenon of "Synesthesia". The way I would personally describe it (I am sure most, if not all, neurologists would disagree with me) would be a phenomenon when two or more senses linked together, to create a higher consciousness (or unconsciousness in this case) that transcends the norm, making you feel things slightly differently than others. Diane Ackerman's opening sentence in the Synesthesia chapter of A Natural History of The Senses, possibly describes this better:
"A creamy blur of succulent blue sound smells like week-old strawberries dropped onto a tin sieve as mother approaches in a halo of color, chatter, and a perfume like thick golden butterscotch."
She defines Synesthesia saying that "stimulation of one sense stimulates another", while the word actually comes from the Greek syn (together) and aisthanesthai (to perceive). According to Richard E. Cytowie, author of the book The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Synesthesia occurs in the limbic system, the most primitive part of the brain. He states that those whose limbic system is not entirely governed by the much more sophisticated and more recently evolved cortex. His book seems to look at the phenomenon as more of a neurological disease of some sort, although he, on many occasions, writes that the phenomenon is fascinating and should not be considered as a handicap but as an advantage. He also states that those who experience intense Synesthesia are about one in every 500,000, ignoring those cases that seem to be more about association rather than Synesthesia. The difference is, with association, you kind to have to think about it for a little while, to see what fits, but with Synesthesia, the connection between both senses just happens, with no explanation to it.
According to Sean A. Day (moderator of The Synesthesia List), the types of Synesthesia are:
Current count: (at least) 54 types of synesthesia
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Cytowie goes further and distinguishes three different levels of Synesthesia:
The Direct Level: Sensually concrete, stimulus-response combination should be invariant. The same stimulus should always trigger the same reflex over and over. If one links the color red to the note A, this link will always remain, and not change under any circumstances, yet it is semantically meaningless. Cytowie calls this a Low Link (One to One) level.
The Cognitive Level: Sensually abstract, context may influence the experience. One may start to react to passages of music rather than specific notes. Cytowie says this level is loaded with meaning, and links it to the Aristotle cross-modal associations found in normal people. He calls this a High Link (One to Many) level.
The Intermediate Level: Associations and partly invariant, partly contextual. Intermediate link (One to a Few) level.
For purposes of this thesis, the concentration would be on the Cognitive Level Synesthesia. It seems to me, that the colored music type in the list above is of most fruitful investigation, although Kandinsky, a synesthite, also talks about line width and character that expresses different musical sounds or instruments (from point and line to plain). I personally experience point and line character synesthesia when listening to music, and particular songs or musical pieces paint an overlay wash on the image in my head. For the final project for Professor Noonan's seminar, the idea of colored music was tested in the below movie clip. Each song would highlight a different hue or tone to the visual image. The movie clip (which was also uploaded in another blog post) is supposed to convey my experience while listening to my ipod and walking through the McKeldin Mall of the University of Maryland.
While I tend to experience these washes to certain types and moods of music, other would experience colored music in musical scales. To Rimski-Korsakov, the Cmaj scale was white, while Alexander Scriabin saw it as red. These composers also saw musical notes as colors, the following graph lists how different composers and personalities saw the notes of western music and colors. 
As the thesis year goes on, more information will be provided about each of the personalities on the list.
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