Synesthesia and mismatched sheets
Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sense evokes another. Certainly the taste/smell connection is well documented, but other combinations are much more interesting, such as the colors pianist Laura Rosser sees when playing music. Not only does she associate Db major with periwinkle blue and B major with silver ("with all those silver sharps in it"), but color combinations perfectly acceptable to visual aesthetes sometimes strike her for their musical dissonance:I have a periwinkle room at my house and I couldn't figure out one day why it just didn't make sense to have yellow sheets on the mattress, because everybody else seemed to like it fine. Something just didn't seem right. And then I put it into musical terms and thought, No, that's a tritone. That's Db and G. No wonder I don't like it.A tritone (sometimes called the "devil's interval") is an augmented fourth, or a perfect fourth stretched another half step to make a jarring dissonance. You can make a tritone yourself: just hum the first two notes of "The Simpsons" theme. Ugly, no?
Comments
I remember a music teacher once saying that if he goes to the piano and plays a tritone a few times before going to bed, he just can't go to sleep without getting up and going back to the piano to resolve it.
Root 2 is a funny number. I wonder what interval the golden ratio corresponds to?
The Golden Ratio is approximately 1.62. Minor sixth = 1.584 and major sixth = 1.6818.
Perhaps a golden ratio interval is common in Indian music?