Synaesthesia motivates early visual music but is no longer its defining criterion

Synaesthesia — the idea that senses interrelate in ways that link music to color and form — inspired the first wave of visual music around 1900 (color organs, Kandinsky, Scriabin) and justified projects that used strict mathematical mappings of sound frequencies to visual frequencies. By the 2010s, scholars (Keefer and Ox among them) acknowledged that synaesthesia is ‘certainly not the prominent or most significant definition’ of visual music any more; at best it operates metaphorically. Critics warned as early as 1986 (Moritz) against ‘the delusion of technology’ in the same tradition. The shift matters for practitioners: chasing literal synaesthetic mappings is not required for work to be recognized as visual music, but understanding why synaesthesia was central helps contextualize the aesthetic ambitions of historical and contemporary pieces.

Examples

A color organ that maps C = red, D = orange etc. (strict synaesthesia). A contemporary piece where visuals are composed using musical structures without any color-to-pitch claim (structural analogy, post-synaesthetic visual music).

Assessment

Explain why synaesthesia is not a sufficient definition of visual music today and propose a more current criterion, citing at least one example.