You give each of the twelve notes a color, hear each note with its color, then answer twice: with color and without. It’s a memory experiment, and the link between color and note is not universal — Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov disagreed with each other, and people who see colors when they hear don’t share one table either.
Check your volume. Phone speakers lose the low notes; headphones help.
Tap a note, then a color.
Listen and look: each note shows up in its color from your map.
Did the color help you? The two scores are a clue, not the answer. Here the color may have served as a memory aid — and on the grey tiles that aid is gone.
One session proves nothing. Notes are drawn with repeats, so guessing averages 1 right out of 12 — and the no-color round always comes after the color round.
CLASSIC PITCH · LEVEL 1 OF 44 · C AND GOpens the game in the app: no colors, one new note per level. No account until level 4.
Both Russian composers linked colors to keys, and their lists have appeared side by side since 1911, when Leonid Sabaneyev published Scriabin’s next to Rimsky-Korsakov’s, recorded by Vasily Yastrebtsev in 1908. They overlap in only a few places: a yellowish D, a blue E, an A♭ leaning toward violet. C is red for Scriabin and white for Rimsky-Korsakov; F is dark red against green; A is green against pink.
Scriabin thought his correspondences held for everyone. According to Sabaneyev’s memoirs, only three colors were clear to him — red, yellow and blue, for C, D and F♯ — and he worked out the rest along the circle of fifths.
One detail changes how to read the table: the colors belonged to keys, not to single notes. Here each color goes to the note that names the key — our own adaptation, for a game of one note at a time.
| Scriabin | Rimsky-Korsakov | |
|---|---|---|
| C | red | white |
| C♯/D♭ | violet | dark, warm (no hue given) |
| D | yellow | yellowish, the color of daylight |
| D♯/E♭ | steel, with a metallic sheen | dark, gloomy, bluish grey |
| E | whitish blue | sapphire blue, bright |
| F | dark red | clear green, the color of foliage |
| F♯/G♭ | blue, bright | greyish green |
| G | orange-pink | brownish gold, light |
| G♯/A♭ | purplish violet | greyish violet |
| A | green | pink, clear |
| A♯/B♭ | like E♭: steel, metallic sheen | dark (no hue given) |
| B | like E: whitish blue | gloomy dark blue with a steel sheen |
Scriabin: table published by Sabaneyev in 1911; Rimsky-Korsakov: published by Yastrebtsev in 1908 — both as translated by Galeyev and Vanechkina (2001). Variants exist, and the colors were for keys.
In sound-to-color synesthesia, hearing a sound brings up a color without the person choosing it, and for that person the pairing stays stable: getting the same colors when the test is repeated months later is the criterion researchers use to tell it apart from ordinary association (Simner and colleagues, 2006). What does not carry over is the table from one person to the next.
Ward, Huckstep and Tsakanikos (2006) asked synesthetes and non-synesthetes to pick colors for sounds of varying pitch and timbre, single notes and intervals. The synesthetes were more precise and more consistent, but both groups followed shared tendencies, such as giving lighter colors to higher sounds.
How common it is depends on how it is measured. Using a consistency test, Simner and colleagues found some type of synesthesia in 22 of 500 university students (4.4%); earlier estimates ranged from 1 in 4 to 1 in 100,000. For sound-to-color synesthesia on its own, this page gives no figure.
It is a comparison within one session: twelve answers on colored tiles, twelve on the same tiles in grey, and the two scores side by side. It is not a test of synesthesia or of perfect pitch — to see where your ear is today there is the perfect pitch test. Nor does it show that color helps anyone learn notes: one session is too little, and the notes are drawn with repeats, so guessing alone averages 1 right out of 12.
We don’t know, and the page doesn’t claim it. It compares, in one session, how many you got right with color and without. To train note names by sound, Classic Pitch starts with two notes and adds one per level.
None of them. Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov disagree on many of the keys, and people with sound-to-color synesthesia differ from one another too, despite some shared tendencies. What matters here is that you remember yours.
It may be. A web page can’t confirm it: researchers repeat the test months apart. If your colors match none of these tables, that is to be expected — they are yours. Build an approximation under “My map” (there are 16 colors; yours are probably finer) and compare.
It is debated. Working from what his friend and biographer Sabaneyev recorded, Galeyev and Vanechkina (2001) conclude that his analogies were associative and largely reasoned out.
It is the comparison. Without it, a good score with color says nothing about the color. Because it always comes second, you have heard the notes more times by then — keep that in mind.