The Russian Composer IELTS Reading Answers

"I can't say. I'm colour blind", was my flatmate's response. And that was that for another twenty odd years, when by chance I came across an article in a newspaper on research into synaesthesia at a London hospital. At last, I understood my interpretation of the world through colour. Synaesthesia is the subjective sensation of a sense other than the one being stimulated.

For example, the sight of a word may evoke sensations of colour or the sound of music may also have a similar effect, as may taste. Or, to put it simply, synacsthctes, i.e. people with synaesthesia, have their senses hooked together, so that they experience several senses simultaneously. To those not already aware of it, synaesthesia seems a new phenomenon. Yet, it is far from new. In 1690, John Locke, the philosopher, wrote of a blind man with synaesthetic capabilities. 

The first reference in the medical field was in 1710, by Thomas Woodhouse, an English ophthalmologist. In his Theory of Colour, the German writer, Goethe, talked about colour and the senses. The poet, Arthur Rimbaud, wrote about synaesthesia in his 1871 poem Voyelles, as did another French poet Baudelaire, in Correspondence. So, synaesthesia

has a respectable history. Synaesthesia is understandably met with a certain degree of skepticism, since it is something beyond the ken of the vast majority of people.

Son et lumière shows in the 19th century were an attempt at combining the senses in a public display, but such displays were not capable of conveying the sensations experienced by involuntary synaesthesia, as the ability which a synaesthete's experience is called. There has been a number of well-documented synacsthctes.

Alexander Scriabin, the Russian composer, (1871-1915) tried to express his own

synaesthetic abilities in his symphony Prometheus, the Poem of Fire (1922). And another Russian, RImsky-Korsakov, noted the colour associations musical keys possessed. For example, Scriabin saw C major as red, while to Rimsky- Korsakov it was white. Arthur Bliss, an English composer, based his 1922 Colour Symphony on the concept of synaesthesia. He did not claim to be a synaesthete; his colour choices were arbitrary and the project an intellectual exercise.

In the field of the visual arts, probably the best known artist with synaesthetic capabilities is the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), credited with being the founder of abstract painting. It is said he experienced "sensory fusion" at a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin, with the music producing colours before his eyes.

He did not see colours solely in terms of objects, but associated them with sounds. He even composed an opera, Der GelbeKlang (The Yellow Sound), which was a mixture of colour, light, dance and sound. For many people with synaesthesia, knowing that what they have been experiencing has both a name and a history and that they are among a

number of notable sufferers is a revelation, Initially, they often feel that these is something wrong psychologically or mentally, or that everyone feds that way. Then they realise with a thud that other people do not. Suppression is an option, but unwittingly some people have managed to make use of the ability to their advantage.

While the condition of synaesthesia may hamper many people because of its disorienting effects, It can also open up a range of new skills, It is not unusual for people who have synaesthesia to be creative and imaginative, As many studies have shown, memory is based to some extent on association. Synacsthctes find they are able to remember certain things with great ease. The person who associates the shape of a word with colour is quite often able to remember a longer sequence of words; and the same goes for other areas where memory needs to he used. 

Cut this condition like all gifts, has its drawbacks, Some people see words as colours; others even individual letters and syllables, so that a word becomes a kaleidoscope of colour. Beautiful though such a reading experience may be, synaesthesia can cause problems with both reading and writing, Reading can take longer, because one has to wade through all the colours, as well as the words! And, because the colour sequences as well as the words have to fit together writing is then equally difficult.