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www.nature.com wrote:Synaesthete makes sweet music
Ruth Francis

Professional musician distinguishes intervals with her tongue

A recorder player has fascinated neuroscientists with her ability to taste differences in the intervals between notes.

The condition in which the brain links two or more of the senses is known as synaesthesia, and some sense combinations are relatively common. But this is the first time that the ability has been found to help in performing a mental task, such as identifying a major third.

Elizabeth Sulston was at school when she first noticed that she saw colours while hearing music. She realized that the same was not true of her peers, although linkage of tone and colour is a known synaesthetic combination.

As she began to learn music more formally, she found that when hearing particular tone intervals she experienced a characteristic taste on her tongue. For example, a minor third tasted salty to her, whereas a minor sixth tasted like cream. She started to use the tastes to help her recognize different chords.

Talking to news@nature.com, she says: "I always had the synaesthesia, but really became conscious of it at 16. Then I started to use it for the tone-interval identification. I could first check it by counting the space between the notes, and second by 'feeling' my tongue."

The taste of music

Lutz Jäncke, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, works with musicians who report unusual qualities or skills. Thanks to a student investigating synaesthesia he was introduced to the recorder-playing Sulston.

To test her unique ability, he and his colleagues played tone intervals while delivering different tastes to her tongue. They used either the same taste that Sulston associates with an interval, or a clashing one (see box).

They found that she was able to identify the intervals much more quickly when the taste matched the one that she says she normally associates with it. That kind of pattern would be difficult to fake, Jäncke says. He reports the results in Nature1.

"With incongruent taste she was sometimes slower than other musicians; she is extraordinarily quick usually," he says. "The synaesthesia is kind of boosting her performance. Her hit rate was perfect, but the difference was in the reaction times."

Learning analogue

When asked whether Sulston's ability has any wider implications for neuroscience, Jäncke laughs. "This is the million-dollar question!" he says.

"One might speculate that this could be a good analogue for learning: our skills are improved if we associate the item we learn with many other items. It may also demonstrate that synaesthesia may be modified for learning and used for other things."

For Sulston herself, the benefit comes simply from the way that she experiences music. "I can imagine that someone who has no synaesthetic perception does not have such an intense sensation as I do when listening to music," she says.

"Music is richer. It is difficult to say whether I would have become a musician if I was not synaesthetic.

Hyperion wrote:Cool. Synaethesia is a pretty fascinating subject.

It may or may not be related, but I feel sound more than I hear it, while it makes understanding voice a little harder than it is for others, it makes me very sensitive to music, namely frequency and tone. I also somewhat sense it as a mind's eye visualization of the components of the song, but that is probably normal for a lot of musically minded people.

Ace Pace wrote: Same, I feel musical notes as if the instrument was somewhere in my body, or its just me being weird.

Anyways, very intresting article.

xBlackFlash wrote::bashes Tevar on the head:

SHHHHHHH!!!!!

You CAN train for it damnit!!

Zaia wrote: ...Ah well, I'll just have to be content with working on my relative pitch skills and rock out on them.

Saurencaerthai wrote:

Zaia wrote: ...Ah well, I'll just have to be content with working on my relative pitch skills and rock out on them.

That's probably the more useful skill, anyhow, as that deals more with the motion of things than individual points in the music.

I don't know if you can train for it... I thought it was inborn.

Zaia wrote:

Saurencaerthai wrote:

Zaia wrote: ...Ah well, I'll just have to be content with working on my relative pitch skills and rock out on them.

That's probably the more useful skill, anyhow, as that deals more with the motion of things than individual points in the music.

Yeah, but I still envy those perfect-pitch-bitches anyhow. I'd like to be able to do it all, baby.

Zaia wrote:[Yeah, but I still envy those perfect-pitch-bitches anyhow. I'd like to be able to do it all, baby.

Queeb Salaron wrote:

Zaia wrote:[Yeah, but I still envy those perfect-pitch-bitches anyhow. I'd like to be able to do it all, baby.

I love playing with people with perfect pitch. Helps me tune easier. "Hey Rita, give me an A."

[tunes accordingly]

Saves me a ton of money on tuners. Besides, she can always tell me when I go out of tune.

Table 1 Tasting the tones

These are the tastes experienced by Sulston in response to hearing different tone intervals. The fourth and tritone intervals elicit visual and emotional responses rather than tastes. The dissonant tone intervals seem to induce unpleasant tastes, whereas the consonant intervals induce pleasant ones.

Minor second: Sour
Major second: Bitter
Minor third : Salty
Major third : Sweet
Fourth: Mown grass
Tritone: Disgust
Fifth: Pure water
Minor sixth: Cream
Major sixth: Low-fat cream
Minor seventh: Bitter
Major seventh: Sour
Octave: No taste