Four Flats is the Best Key Signature

I don't understand how synesthesia works.

I used to take choir in middle school, and we needed to do some sight-reading exercise.

I know, how does a metalhead / rock fan end up taking this course? Being, well, me, I’d want to learn how to metal scream, but my teacher wasn’t Melissa Cross. Most of the girls did not care for my music taste either, and I didn’t quite fit in into that class¹.

Anyways, the sheet music started with an F note, but our teacher started us off on E. Being the pedant I was, I pointed this out, suggesting the right note to start with. The choir teacher checked this with the piano, and I was correct! As such, she made me stay after class, played some simple chords, I guessed them, and I found out that I had perfect pitch.

Apparently, this is very valuable. One of my friends at the time, Todd, told me that I was extremely lucky to have this ability. He usually wouldn’t spare any opportunity to denigrate me, so he might’ve been onto something—it might partly explain why I could often get away with remembering a melody instead of reading sheet music.

However, if I was the kind of person to be content with party tricks, I wouldn’t be writing on Substack—something is missing from this equation. Do you remember the colour of every car, or do you happen to know the colours, and can apply that knowledge to unfamiliar contexts?

Well, I can hear colour. I realized this when at the age of 12 or so (2018-ish), I accidentally downloaded a slightly slowed-down version of Doomed by Bring Me the Horizon², which had a lower key (A flat instead of A natural). I realized that I preferred the lower key, because the “colour” was nicer.

It’s difficult to describe—after all, if it was possible for me to fully capture the colors with a static descriptor, this wouldn’t be such a captivating experience. Spirals of light.

Yes, this is the old Windows Ribbon Screensaver.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s use the universal experience of seeing colour when one rubs their closed eyes. Seeing things—kaleidoscopes, swirling ribbons, stars, lines, whatever—without your retinal cells being stimulated by light is a form of phosphenes. Pressure activates ganglion cells, causing you to see something—yet you can never truly focus on the sight, but you know it’s there.

In the same way, I don’t literally see the ribbons, but I know that they must be there, those vague currents underlying my listening experience. It’s as if there’s a veil that’s preventing me from fully appreciating the spirals.

Usually, this undertow’s outshined by the thought of playing an imaginary guitar to a lot of people (yet to recognize my brilliance), but there are hints of colour that attach themselves to the sonic realm. The colours aren’t static, and some keys are a bit more iridescent (streaks are meant to show the multitude of colours), but I’ve mapped them onto the circle of fifths as best as I could.

I marked the keys I generally enjoy with a star (although it does depend on the song itself), and from here, five to six sharps seems to be my least preferred area. This makes sense as I can’t think of too many songs that I listen to. There are a couple, but they’re few and far between.

I did take music lessons as a child, and my favorite piece was this etude in B flat dorian, which is just A flat major, but starting on the note of B flat. It’s still four flats, and this has always sounded the best to me. It’s so beautiful that I don’t even want to compose anything in that key signature, lest I fail to do it justice and I cheapen it. Given that it’s so difficult to find something in that key, I suppose most bands must agree with me—surely, it can’t be that most guitar tunings don’t easily lend themselves to songs in F minor!

It seems as if the number of sharps correspond to varying shades of orange, brown, or crimson, and I’ve always been a bit of a cool colour person. However, F# minor is one of my favorite keys, to the point that I wouldn’t want Muse to transpose Showbiz or Muscle Museum to any other key.

I don’t have a good answer to this; the technical term for hearing colour is chromesthesia, but what is it that makes certain colours sound the way they do to me?

The answer must lie at the intersection of psychology and music theory, but I don’t know enough about either to fully figure it out. After all, that circle of fifths doesn’t show a clear rainbow, nor some clear pattern for how I ascribe colour to the sound. Can I comprehend these aural idiosyncrasies, and tie them together with some overarching knowledge? Where do I begin?

1. I have stories about this, someday I might write an article about this.

2. It upsets me that I used to know the band (and was at odds to find a fellow fan) before their amo era, after which they became extremely popular, and now it’s difficult to appreciate the There is a Hell…, Sempiternal, and That’s the Spirit albums that my younger self would listen to without seeming like a bandwagon fan. I even listened to that Suicide Season album!

Still, I’ll be grateful to Bring Me the Horizon for their Royal Albert show, as it indirectly got me into symphonic metal—prior to encountering this show, I had no clue that orchestral instruments could even be associated with metal or heavier music, and I would never have discovered Nightwish without this.