Music-colour synaesthesia: a conceptual correspondence grounded in action

This thesis describes a radically different account of music-colour synaesthesia in four journal-style papers that develop and test the hypothesis that some forms of music-colour synaesthesia are mediated by concept and context, but grounded in sensorimotor action. Paper One illustrates the breadth of the phenomenology surrounding music-colour synaesthesia, reviews eight neuroimaging studies examining coloured hearing, and discusses the role of conceptual and semantic inducers. Paper Two presents an empirical investigation that demonstrates synaesthesia elicited by written musical key signatures is a genuine form of synaesthesia elicited from the concept, or the idea, of the key. The results also suggest an active role for the body and Paper Three sets out a theoretical framework for a sensorimotor explanation for music-colour synaesthesia. This stems from embodied and enactive accounts of typical music cognition and it is argued that the attributes of “bodiliness” and “grabbiness” might be found in a sonic environment, and that music listening might be perceived as an “act of doing”. Finally, Paper Four presents the results of an empirical investigation that examines the relationships between emotion, action, and synaesthesia and continuations with non-synaesthetic perception. Overall, the results of the project reinforce an existing argument that a single mechanism is not sufficient to explain synaesthetic experiences that arise on hearing music, and highlight the role of multimodal/sensorimotor features in music-colour synaesthesia with a particular focus on its embodied and enactive nature. Future researchers are encouraged to place synaesthesia in response to music on a continuum from “synaesthesia” to “typical music cognition” including consideration of the implications that this may have for theories of synaesthesia, rather than assuming it to be special, separate and unconnected.