Synaesthesia is the the mixing of senses. Synaesthetes are known to associate colors or images with words, numbers, sounds as well as any other combinations you can think of.

Many see this as an psychological ailment, but the overwhelming number of successful synaesthete artists and musicians sees things differently. It may actually have a direct link with creativity in the brain.

I propose a musical keyboard with either a color screen or lights, which assigns a different color to each note in an octave with darker shades for low notes, lighter for higher, and brightness/opacity linked to velocity (how hard you hit the key). Colors would blend together for chords.

The keyboard would come with pre-selected colors for the notes, but they could be rearranged by the user according to taste.

This could even be made as a pretty simple computer program to be used with MIDI keyboards.
-- Joolin, Oct 10 2009

Halfbakery: Rainbow Pianow Rainbow_20Pianow
[jutta, Oct 10 2009]

Wikipedia: Synesthesia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
Background. [jutta, Oct 10 2009]

and this produces synesthesia how ? without the method this is a "light organ" (google is your friend).
-- FlyingToaster, Oct 10 2009


Sorry [Joolin], but connecting sound and light has already been done in almost every possible permutation, including this one. None of which induce synaesthesia.

The most effective methods use drugs which alter your neural connections - but they do have other fairly serious effects in the brain and are best avoided.
-- wagster, Oct 10 2009


also, sadly I don't think that the cones in the eyes line up with any sort of frequency multiplying so you might be able to see a chord, but it wouldn't be recognizable as being tuned or anything (which of course begs for a translation algorithm but I don't think the eyes are set up for that anyways).
-- FlyingToaster, Oct 10 2009



random, halfbakery