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Objets lyriques: les incarnations

“A Light in Sound, a Sound-Like Power in Light”: Poetry, Synaesthesia & Multimedia

Philip Lindholm
p. 77-103

Abstract

Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon of cross-modal perception in which stimulation of one sensory pathway results in automatic, simultaneous, involuntary experiences in a second sensory pathway, such as the perceiving of sound as a colour. Creatively employed as a literary trope, synaesthesia involves the blending of different sense modalities, often in the form of figurative language. Exploring the interrelationship of synaesthetic aesthetics and experimentation from a historical perspective, this essay traces the transgressive artistic impulse to blur sensorial boundaries through technical innovation from the eighteenth-century audio-visual experiments of Louis Bertrand Castel’s ocular harpsichord (clavecin pour les yeux) to twenty-first century LED colour organs, speech coding, and Augmented/Virtual Reality interfaces used in multisensory art exhibitions. By outlining a few of the major historical developments of synaesthetic theory and poetics as well as some of the diverse immersive experiences made possible through original combinations of discrete sensory channels via transmedial artistic experimentation, the present paper aims to demonstrate how synaesthesia – located at the interface of literature and neuroscience, sensation and ideation, mind and body – might also fruitfully be explored in relation to lyric poetry at the interface of multisensoriality and multimedia.

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Testo integrale

“Synaesthetic perception, which is forever inventing the world anew, militates against conventionalism.”
K. Dann,
Bright Colors Falsely Seen, p. 122.

“[Poetry] creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.”
D. H. Reiman, N. Fraistat (eds),
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 533.

  • 1 J. N. Cox (ed.), Keats’s Poetry and Prose, p. 442.
  • 2 A. Preminger, T. V. F. Brogan et al. (eds), “Synaesthesia”, p. 1259. The British spelling of the (...)
  • 3 For a recent discussion of the phenomenology of synaesthesia, see: J. Ward, “Synaesthesia”.
  • 4 Having said that, V. S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard note that “synaesthesia is purported to be (...)

1In Isabella, or The Pot of Basil by John Keats, a versified adaptation from a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron (IV.5), the narrator invites the reader to “take a glance” at the “old tale” (l. 389) in order to “taste the music of that vision pale” (l. 392), thereby blending the gustatory, auditory and visual senses synaesthetically in order to evoke the imaginative and somatic powers of poetry and song1. Creatively employed as a literary trope, synaesthesia – a neurological phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory pathway (the so-called “inducer”) results in automatic, simultaneous, involuntary experiences in a second sensory pathway (the “concurrent”), such as the perceiving of sound as a colour, or of shapes as having a taste – often takes the form of a type of figurative language “wherein one sense modality is felt, perceived or described in terms of another, e.g. describing a voice as velvety, warm, heavy, or sweet, or a trumpet-blast as scarlet”2. The metaphorical qualities of sensory blending are not, however, limited to literature; common examples in everyday language include referring to a “loud” colour, a “bright” or “warm” sound, a “bittersweet” memory or describing a person as “hot” or “cold” in reference to their desirability or disagreeableness, respectively. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between cognitive synaesthesia, generally understood as a perceptual phenomenon resulting from a type of cross-wiring in the brain involving so-called “cross-modal” associations and correspondences, and literary synaesthesia, which involves the intermingling of different sense modalities for aesthetic purposes3. A similar distinction must be made between actual synaesthetes – people affected with synaesthesia, believed to constitute between four to five percent of the general population – and those whom we might term “syn-aesthetes”, such as authors creatively employing the blending of the senses in the service of poiēsis (ποίησις), who may, or may not, also be synaesthetes in the strict sense4.

  • 5 G. O’Malley, “Literary Synesthesia”.
  • 6 P. L. Duffy, “Synesthesia in Literature”, p. 647.

2As a rhetorical device, synaesthesia generally takes the form of cross-sensory metaphor or “intersense analogy”5 characterised by sense transfer, the use of the terminology of one sense impression to describe the sensation of another, or sensory conflation, “where perceptions from two different sensory modalities are blended together, for effect”6. Etymologically, “synaesthesia” is derived from the Ancient Greek synaísthēsis (συναίσϑησις) – translating roughly to “joint-sensation” – combining the prefix σύν (syn), “together” or “together with”, and the stem αἰσθε (aisthe), “to feel, perceive, after anaesthesia” (“synaesthesia, n.”, OED online), related to the verb aisthánomai (αἰσθάνομαι) or aisthánesthai (αἰσϑάνεσϑαι), meaning to perceive or apprehend. It is significant that the term is closely related to aísthēsis (αἴσθησῐς) – which refers to both intellectual and sense-perception – and aisthētikós (αἰσθητικός), with the “aesthetic” as it were embedded in “synaesthesia”, given that sensory fusion has long been linked to the operations of sensation, perception, cognition and imagination central to wider debate on arts and aesthetics, ranging from poetry’s historical link to oral tradition and musical performance in different cultures to theories of the “sisterhood” of poetry and painting or the artistic synthesis of Art Nouveau and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.

3Despite primarily being a neurological phenomenon, then, what is now known as “synaesthesia” has from the outset been associated with the creative tension between sensation and ideation and with the imaginative associations, visionary perceptual states and complex mental operations central to artistic practice and aesthetic theory. This is reflected in the ways in which both the sciences and arts have for centuries attempted to understand and to exploit the creative possibilities of the blending of the senses through formal experimentation and technological innovation. By briefly outlining a selection of the major historical developments of synaesthetic theory and poetics as well as a number of the diverse immersive experiences made possible through original combinations of discrete sensory channels in lyric poetry and other forms of intermedial or transmedial experimentation, this essay aims to demonstrate how synaesthesia – located at the interface of literature and neuroscience, perception and association, mind and body – might also fruitfully be explored at the conjunction of multisensoriality and multimedia.

1. Sharp consonants and coloured vowels: synaesthetic theory and poetics, from Aristotelian ethics to symbolist decadence

  • 7 On the complex history of the term “synaesthesia”, see: J. Jewanski et al., “The Evolution of the (...)
  • 8 In the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman, Emily Wilson translates the siren’s s (...)
  • 9 Quoted in J. D. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism, p. 30.
  • 10 Quoted in G. O’Malley, “Literary Synesthesia”, p. 391.
  • 11 A. Ćwiek et al., “The bouba/kiki Effect is Robust Across Cultures and Writing Systems”. See also: (...)

4While the term “synaesthesia” was not popularised before the end of the nineteenth century in scientific circles – the first use of it in the modern sense is attributed to Jules Millet in his 1892 thesis L’Audition Colorée – its etymology is nevertheless revealing, because the Ancient Greeks were among the first to recognise the underlying aesthetic basis of the correlation of the senses7. The recurrent motif of synaesthesia is encountered in both the Iliad and Odyssey8, and the sensuous qualities of Homer’s poetry in general have been described in synaesthetic terms, as when Samuel Johnson writes in The Rambler No. 94 (1751) that “Dionysus himself tells us, that the sound of Homer’s verses sometimes exhibits the idea of corporal bulk”9. In De Anima, Aristotle describes “a sort of parallelism between what is acute or grave to hearing and what is sharp or blunt to touch”, also noting that “acute and grave are here metaphors, transferred from their proper sphere, viz. that of touch”10, thus anticipating by two millennia the modern psychological and neuroscientific examination of correspondences between speech sounds and visual properties, in particular the non-arbitrary attribution of abstract meanings to sounds and shapes by the human brain, such as experiments with the so-called “bouba/kiki effect” (also known as the “maluma/takete effect”)11.

  • 12 On Proust and synaesthesia, see M. Verna, Le sens du plaisir.

5The most prominent examples of literary synaesthesia and the inter-sensory imagination are arguably encountered in nineteenth century French literature, including Marcel Proust’s vivid “episode of the madeleine” and related passages on the phenomenon of involuntary memory from À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)12 and, in particular, the poems of the French Symbolists. The first of the two preeminent Symbolist formulations of sensory blending occurs in Charles Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” in Les Fleurs du mal, published in 1857. In this sonnet, Baudelaire explores the mysterious connections among discrete channels of sensory experience in the form of a chorus of faint “echoes” merging into a single unity:

  • 13 “Like prolonged echoes that merge from far away / Into a deep, dark unity, / Vast as the night an (...)

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent
13.

6Baudelaire’s “deep, dark unity” (“une ténébreuse et profonde unité”) is a sacred union resulting from a sensuous “conversation” between that which is heard, smelled and seen in the “temple of nature” (1) (“La Nature est un temple”, l. 1) – referred to earlier in the poem as the “confused utterances” (“de confuses paroles”, l. 2) of its “living pillars” (“de vivants piliers”, l. 1) situated in a “forest of symbols” (“des forêts de symboles”, l. 3) which man traverses. The highly erotic poem “Tout entière”, from the same collection, ends with the lines:

  • 14 “O mystic metamorphosis / Of all my senses fused into one! / Her breath makes music, / And her vo (...)

O métamorphose mystique
De tous mes sens fondus en un!
Son haleine fait la musique,
Comme sa voix fait le parfum!
14

  • 15 Quoted in P. L. Duffy, “Synesthesia in Literature”, p. 651. See also M. Milner, L’imaginaire des (...)
  • 16 D. Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, p. 291.

7Baudelaire returned to this notion of sensory correlations in a description of his own experience of substance-induced synaesthetic unity while under the influence of hashish: “Sound holds color, color holds music. Musical notes become numbers”15. Diane Ackerman notes that “the Symbolists, who were avid drug takers, delighted in the way hallucinogens intensified all their senses simultaneously”, which contributed to their creative cross-sensory experimentation: “Symbol comes from the Greek word symballein, ‘to throw together’, and… the Symbolists believed that “all arts are parallel translations of one fundamental mystery. Senses correspond to each other; a sound can be translated through a perfume and a perfume through a vision’”16. By virtue of being located at the crossroads of sensation and ideation, experience and experimentation, the aesthetic of the synaesthetic thus exploits the creative tension between perception and imagination.

  • 17 A. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes.

8The other widely celebrated, and at the time highly controversial, French synaesthetic sonnet is Arthur Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”, written in 1871 and published in 1883, which reflected the growing interest in emerging medical findings on what was at the time principally known as coloured-hearing (oraudition colorée”). If Baudelaire’s poem is primarily a sonnet on synaesthetic unity, Rimbaud’s visionary poem is a vivid example of synaesthesia at work. Beginning with the line, “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue” (1; my translation), “Voyelles” proceeds to explore surreal associations of vowel sounds and colours described as rapturous sights, sounds and scents, ranging from the black cloud of flies surrounding foul odours (“puanteurs cruelles”) to proud, majestic white glaciers (“Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs”), green billowing seas (“vibrements divins des mers virides”), and the purple-hued eyes of an unspecified addressee, often presumed to be the speaker’s beloved (“rayon violet de Ses Yeux”)17. One of the remarkable aspects of Rimbaud’s poem is the radical way in which it exploits the tension between the sounds of poetry and its typographical presence on the page, thus drawing attention to the palpability, texture and material density of the linguistic signifier in a manner particular to lyric poetry. The multisensory materiality of Rimbaud’s poetic experimentation in “Voyelles”, which contrasts with what contemporary detractors saw as the extravagant and elusive quality of vague, highly subjective synaesthetic impressions, is underlined by a caricature in the review Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui of January 1888 (fig. 1).

Fig. 1 — Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, no318 (Léon Vanier, Paris, 1888).

9This satirical sketch, which shows an adult Rimbaud dressed as a child and painting woodblock letters representing the colored vowels (a black “A”, white “E”, green “U” and red “I”), might appropriately be considered a “multimedial” representation of synaesthetic creation, since the vowels have materialised as tangible playthings (Rimbaud is painting the letter “O” while sitting on the letter “U”, his legs resting on the letter “E”). This is further compounded by the ekphrastic relationship between the poem and the caricature, which partly constitutes a visual illustration of a written text reliant upon the printed medium. In contrast to the sharp outline and palpability of the letters, formless, impressionistic shadows evoking Baudelaire’s “deep, dark unity” (“une ténébreuse et profonde unité”) and Rimbaud’s own “Gulfs of shadows” (“Golfes d’ombre”) loom behind the immature poet-painter, whose playtime consists of whimsically colouring-in the literal building blocks of language while blithely seated at the edge of the abyss.

  • 18 See J. Jewanski et al., “The ‘Golden Age’ of Synesthesia Inquiry in the Late Nineteenth Century ( (...)
  • 19 M. Nordau, Degeneration, p. 22.
  • 20 I. Babbitt, The New Laokoon, p. 174 sq.

10This pointed mockery reflects the fact that, while the phenomenon of coloured hearing became a renewed topic of serious scientific enquiry in the last decades of the nineteenth century18, it was met with virulent resistance in the arts from critics who considered it as a “decadent” modern pathology – as a symptom of nervous overstimulation, deterioration, and “an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity” in the words of Max Nordau, who argues in his cultural tirade Degeneration that “to raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster”19. According to the critic Irving Babbitt, who in the early twentieth century denounced Romantic poets as solipsistic “Arcadian dreamer[s]”, “the habit of interpreting light or color in terms of sound is nearly always a sign of nervous disorder […] color-audition has found literary expression only in those who belong to what we may term the neurotic school”20.

2. Hard fact and light-play: Louis-Bertrand Castel’s “ocular harpsichord” and early experiments with multisensory multimedia

  • 21 I. Newton, Opticks.
  • 22 J. D. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism, p. 30.
  • 23 E. Darwin, The Botanic Garden.

11Scientific interest in the presumed mathematical correspondences between light and sound is typically traced to Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis of 1650 and, in particular, to Isaac Newton’s Opticks of 1704, where the latter proclaims that the spaces occupied by the seven primary colours are similar to the relative intervals between the notes of the musical scale, thus positing an analogy between the spectrum and the octave21. Although John Locke had written about a blind man who claimed to have discovered that what was meant by the colour scarlet was like the sound of a trumpet in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)22, English poets were primarily familiarised with the phenomenon of coloured-hearing through Erasmus Darwin’s influential The Botanic Garden of 178823. Darwin here discusses Newton’s spectrum-gamut parallel, evokes the “Sisterhood of Music and Painting”, and remarks that:

  • 24 Ibid., p. 176.

From this curious coincidence, it has been proposed to produce a luminous music, consisting of successions or combinations of colours, analogous to a tune […]. This might be performed by a strong light, made by means of Mr. Argand’s lamps, passing through coloured glasses, and falling on a defined part of a wall, with moveable blinds before them, which might communicate with the keys of a harpsichord, and thus produce at the same time visible and audible music in unison with each other24.

  • 25 Ibid., p. 177.
  • 26 Quoted in E. von Erhardt-Siebold, “Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romantici (...)

12Darwin further suggests that the sister arts “borrow metaphors from each other; musicians speak of the brilliancy of sounds, and the light and shade of a concerto; and painters of the harmony of colours, and the tone of a picture”. Thus, he concludes, “it is to be wished that some ingenious musician would further cultivate this curious field of science: for if visible music can be agreeably produced, it would be more easy to add sentiment to it by representations of groves and Cupids, and sleeping nymphs amid the changing colours, than is commonly done by the words of audible music”25. In a note added to his poem “The Temple of Nature”, he mentions the “melody of colours” and the “music of the eyes”26. This idea originally gained wide publicity in the eighteenth century with the experiments of the colour organ or ocular harpsichord (“orgue oculaire” or “clavecin pour les yeux”), first proposed in 1725 by the French Jesuit teacher, physicist and philosopher Louis-Bertrand Castel – though never completed in his lifetime – which is the musical instrument Darwin may have been referring to.

  • 27 See J. Jewanski, “Von der Farbe-Ton-Beziehung zur Farblichtmusik”.
  • 28 Rousseau wrote that Castel was “fou mais bonhomme au deumeurant” and Diderot described him as “un (...)
  • 29 N. Halmi, P. Magnuson, R. Modiano (eds), Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, p. 18, n. 6.
  • 30 Th. L. Hankins, R. J. Silverman (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, p. 76.

13With the colour organ, the self-proclaimed mathematician-philosopher Castel hoped to demonstrate a correlation of the senses of vision and hearing by displaying modulated coloured light comparable to music, an idea for which he credited Kircher, rather than Newton, whose perceived overreliance on mathematical calculation, verifiable universal “facts”, and a narrow-minded, instrument-bound experimental method (embodied by Newton’s prism) Castel vehemently rejected27. “Le Père Castel” became a cause célèbre among the philosophers of the Enlightenment and in eighteenth-century salons, obtaining the support of Denis Diderot, who addresses coloured-hearing in his Lettre sur Les sourds et muets (1751), and befriending (and later attacking) Rousseau, who mentions him in his Confessions28. Castel also attracted the attention of Voltaire, with whom he publicly quarreled, although Voltaire was nevertheless prepared to accept the possibility of the sound-colour analogy, asserting – in terms recalling Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reference in “The Eolian Harp” to an underlying universal unity manifested as “A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light”29 – that “this secret analogy between light and sound leads one to suspect that all things in nature have hidden connections, that perhaps will be discovered some day”30. Castel thought of these “analogies” in precise aesthetic terms:

  • 31 Quoted in E. von Erhardt-Siebold, “Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romantici (...)

[T]he green corresponds to re, and will doubtless make them [the audience] feel that this note re is natural, rural, sprightly, pastoral. Red, which corresponds to sol, will give them the idea of a warlike note […] the deaf in this way will be able to see the music of the ears, the blind to hear the music of the eyes, and we who have both eyes and ears will enjoy music and colors better by enjoying them both at the same time31.

  • 32 Th. L. Hankins, R. J. Silverman (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, p. 80.

14Poetry and rhetoric – both of which Castel had taught in Toulouse before moving to Paris – were equally central to the conceptualisation of his ocular harpsichord, which rested on the power of analogy. As Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman explain in Instruments and the Imagination, “Castel claims that analogy is the basis for discovery in natural philosophy and that analogy reveals important connections between science, art, and literature. While there may be many arts and sciences, there is only one truth, which the arts and sciences express from different points of view. In particular, philosophy and poetry have the same object, the same nature, and the same truth – a sublime thought in poetry is equivalent to a discovery in natural philosophy”32.

  • 33 Ibid.
  • 34 A.-M. Chouillet, “Le Clavecin oculaire du P. Castel”, p. 146. On Castel and the eighteenth-centur (...)
  • 35 Th. L. Hankins, R. J. Silverman (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, p. 82.
  • 36 N. Halmi (ed.), Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, p. 88 sq.

15Castel thus believed that both science and poetry shared a mutual dependence on analogy, affirming that “it is analogy that renders these poetic flashes fecund in discoveries. Because what one calls among the poets and orators metaphor, similitude, allegory, figure; a philosopher, a geometer will call analogy, proportion, ratio. All our discoveries, all our scientific truths, are only truths of ratio”33. He extended his method of inquiry by analogy to other art forms, including poetry in motion, by stating that “dance is a veritable ocular harpsichord” and envisioning a performance able to synthesise the different arts and senses in a manner prefiguring Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk34. In equating poetry with truth, particularly a more humane and accessible type of truth – for example in his provocative claim that “Descartes should have presented his ideas in poetry”35 Castel appears less like a child of the Enlightenment than a proto-Romantic poet-philosopher. His faith in the creative correspondences between science and poetry reflects William Wordsworth’s claim in the expanded Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) that “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science”, as well as Wordsworth’s prophetic assertion that the day might come when “the Poet […] will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science […] he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself”36.

16However, as Hankins and Silverman observe, Castell devoted more time and energy to writing about the colour organ than actually attempting to construct it, so that his “invention” increasingly came to be seen as impractical and implausible by his contemporaries. This is underlined by an eighteenth-century caricature by Charles Germain Aubin showing a grey-haired Castel seated at an extravagant harpsichord with colored slides attached to the keys, a painter’s easel at his feet, who, as the caption puts it, is “employing his time” by being doused with water sprinkled from his comical multimedial “machine” in a fruitless attempt to visually materialise sound (fig. 2).

Fig. 2 — Satirical print of Castel’s “Ocular Harpsichord”, by Charles Germain Aubin.

  • 37 A ground-breaking performance of Prometheus at the Yale School of Music in 2010, a century after (...)
  • 38 J. Jewanski, “Die Farblichtmusik Alexander Lászlós”.
  • 39 See Ch. Spence, “Scent and the Cinema”.

17Though never completed in his lifetime, Castel’s “orgue oculaire”, which connected the aesthetic with the rational, had a significant impact on later multisensory and multimedial experimentation. It attracted the attention of composer Georg Philipp Telemann, who saw a prototype of it during his visit to Paris (1737-1738), described it in German the following year, and expressed the desire to compose for it. Alexander Scriabin composed the synaesthetic tone poem Prometheus: Poem of Fire (Op. 60), a symphony of sound and light with a part for the “clavier à lumières” (his own version of the colour organ), first performed in 191137. In the 1920s, the pianist Alexander László experimented with so-called Fablichtmusik (“Colour-Light Music”) by developing the “Sonchromatoskop”, an apparatus using colour-modulating filters, mechanically rotating images of geometric figures, and slide projectors based on watercolour paintings, which premiered during a multimedia performance in 1925, two hundred years after Castel first proposed the colour organ38. The ocular harpsichord was arguably also a precursor to the diverse multimedial and multisensory technological innovations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ranging from LED colour organs and audio visualization software to experiments with scented cinema (such as AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision) and a new interest in immersive 4D film formats (such as 4DX), many of which are now opening up new possibilities for experiencing music and poetry39.

3. Poetry, synaesthesia, and multimedia in the twenty-first century: polysensory perspectives

18It can be argued that all poetry is essentially synaesthetic, given the significant relationship between a poem’s aural features and visual arrangement on the page, its reliance on multisensory imagery, and the fact that reading – aloud or silently – engages both the outer and inner eye and ear, to name but some of the most obvious interrelated factors. Discussing the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interest in synaesthesia and the process of reading more broadly, the ecologist David Abram explains that “reading, as soon as we attend to its sensorial texture, discloses itself as a profoundly synaesthetic encounter”:

  • 40 D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 124.

Our eyes converge upon a visible mark, or a series of marks, yet what they find there is a sequence not of images but of sounds, something heard; the visible letters […] trade our eyes for our ears. Or, rather, the eye and the ear are brought together at the surface of the text – a new linkage has been forged between seeing and hearing which ensures that a phenomenon apprehended by one sense is instantly transposed into the other. Further, we should note that this sensory transposition is mediated by the human mouth and tongue; it is not just any kind of sound that is experienced in the act of reading, but specifically human, vocal sounds40.

  • 41 M. H. Abrams, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, p. 32.

19In his final publication, M. H. Abrams makes a similar point when referring to a “post-Gutenberg fallacy of misplaced concreteness”41, arguing that:

  • 42 Ibid., p. 2.

[It] is easy to overlook the fact that a poem, like all art forms, has a physical medium, a material body, which conveys its nonmaterial meanings. That medium is not a written or printed text. The physical medium is the act of utterance by the human voice, as it produces the speech-sounds that convey a poem. We produce those sounds by varying the pressure on the lungs, vibrating or stilling vocal chords, changing the shape of the throat and mouth, and making wonderfully precise movements of the tongue and lips42.

  • 43 B. Collins, The Apple that Astonished Paris, p. 58.
  • 44 On Neuroaesthetics and the Neurohumanities, see for example: G. G. Starr, Feeling Beauty; L. Zuns (...)
  • 45 P. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain, p. ix-x.

20Modern poetry in particular often encourages us to focus on the bodily dimensions of reading and the somatosensory experience of a poem – usually by drawing attention to the material density of the signifier, rather than the “meaning” of the signified – and this emphasis on sensing over sense-making can paradoxically result in a sophisticated, self-conscious reflection on the sheer pleasures of poetry’s multi-sensoriality and related multimedial potential. This is for example the case with Billy Collins’ poem “Introduction to Poetry”, in which the speaker-teacher wishes to encourage students to “to waterski / across the surface of a poem” (l. 9-10), to “take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide” (l. 1-3), or “to press an ear against its hive” (l. 4), while at the same time lamenting that “all” the students “want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it” (l. 12-14) by “beating it with a hose” (l. 15) in order to “find out what it really means” (l. 16)43. The increasing interest in the physical and material dimensions of poetry and the embodied nature of reading accounts in part for the growing appeal of the rapidly developing fields of Neuroaesthetics, Neurohumanities and literary cognitive studies attempting to elucidate poetry’s intimate relationship to what Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” describes as “all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create, / And what perceive”44. Paul Armstrong’s observation that “we have the kind of brain that thrives by playing with harmony and dissonance” suggests that literary synaesthesia might productively be examined in the context of the “neurobiology of mental functioning” – that is, “the basic tensions in the operations of the brain between the drive for pattern, synthesis and constancy versus the need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change”45.

21It is similarly exciting to consider the imaginative possibilities offered by pioneering technologies for the creation and the study of poetry, not only so as to attempt to understand how poetry affects the brain, but also in order to explore the ways in which multisensory poetry might be innovatively experienced in the twenty-first century and beyond in relation to the digital humanities. In the recent study Multisensory Experiences: Where the Senses Meet Technology, Marianna Obrist and Carlos Velasco note that “the last few decades have seen an explosion of research on the role of the human senses in the formation and development of our experiences, as well as on novel multisensory technologies” shaping our experiences and interactions with our environment, with significant implications for the way in which we experience art:

  • 46 C. Velasco, M. Obrist, Multisensory Experiences, p. 4 sq.

Our growing understanding of the senses and multisensory technologies, as well as the increased symbiosis between humans and technology, have both facilitated the development of the concept of multisensory experiences […] [which] is based on the idea that we are not just passive receivers present in, but instead can be active creators of, the multisensory worlds in which we live46.

22Among several examples of such “multisensory experiences”, which they define as the deliberate designing and crafting of novel experiences by artificially controlling sensory stimulation and delivery, Obrist and Velasco describe polysensory culinary events as well as an experimental art gallery featured in Tate Sensorium, a multisensory exhibition at the Tate Britain in London. In an attempt to explore questions such as, “Can we augment a painting’s feel through textures, smells, and even tastes? How can the addition of sensory cues transform the way we experience a given art form?”, one of the exhibit’s installations included the 1945 painting Figure in a Landscape by Francis Bacon:

  • 47 Ibid., p. 7.

Visitors experienced Francis Bacon’s painting with taste, smell, and sound stimuli. The sound was presented to the visitors via headphones. The taste stimulus was delivered in form of chocolate (praline) on a plinth, in a bed of tiny chocolate bits that evoked soil. This taste depicted the painting’s dark, harsh nature and the wartime era with multiple ingredients, namely, charcoal, sea salt, cacao nibs, and smoky Lapsang souchong tea. It also aimed to reference the London park setting and flashes of colour with burnt orange. The accompanying smells aimed to convey a sense of Hyde Park’s smellscape of grass, soil, and earth, but also a horsey scent. The sound stimuli referenced the colour palette, visual texture, and the place depicted in the painting47.

23In a similarly multisensory context, authors and readers are likely to find inspiration in experimental digital platforms such as the Google Arts & Culture project “Play a Kandinsky”, an interactive online platform allowing users to “hear” the colours and shapes which the synaesthete Wassily Kandinsky might have heard while painting, and to “play” his 1925 masterpiece “Yellow Red Blue” like a musical piece with the help of machine learning by clicking on various parts of the painting on the screen48.

24It can also prove rewarding to examine the ways in which other artistic mediums such as film, photography or multiplatform tools like LED colour organs, speech coding devices, audio visualisation programmes, and Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) headsets – interfaces that are increasingly integrating olfactory and haptic inputs – might contribute to the somatosensory experience of “multimedia poetry”. The latter might to this end be defined as an adaptive, embodied, technologically-enhanced hybrid “text” able to stimulate all of the senses – sometimes simultaneously – while offering new bodily avenues of interaction with an art form that is still predominantly associated with print media. We might, for instance, imagine an interactive, multisensory poetry “experience” for Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” involving a wine-tasting event accompanied by ambient recordings of a nightingale’s song, aiming to offer the participating audience a heightened and – both figuratively and literally – intoxicating experience of the poem’s celebrated synaesthetic description of a beaker of wine seemingly tapped straight out of the fertile southern soil (l. 11-14):

  • 49 J. N. Cox (ed.), Keats’s Poetry and Prose, p. 458.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
49

25In these lines, which are among the most sensuous in the English language, Keats combines the impressionistic and suggestive with the sensuously concrete in order to emphasise the impact of the unseen bird’s song on the poem’s speaker, who is experiencing a type of emotional rhapsody which brings about the creative mood and inspires the imagination. The stanza is vividly synaesthetic, combining the auditory, tactile and kinaesthetic senses in its associative, somatosensory description of flavour-perception: the “draught of vintage” evokes both the “Cool” of the “deep-delved earth” and the “sunburt mirth” of the “warm South”, and the wine tastes – all at once – of the goddess “Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provençal song”.

26In a later stanza, the poem’s entranced speaker maintains to have succeeded in using the “viewless wings of poesy” to “fly” to the nightingale singing in the night-time woods; they imagine being “with” the songbird in the “forest dim” in lines that appeal vividly to the senses in order to paradoxically describe a moment of sensory deprivation in the dark (l. 41-50):

  • 50 Ibid., p. 459.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves
50.

  • 51 M. H. Abrams, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, p. 35.

27Unable to “see” the “flowers” at their feet, the speaker is nevertheless able to imagine each surrounding flower in the “embalmed darkness” and to opulently evoke the “sweet” aroma and “soft incense” conferred upon the forest by the season, so that, through the workings of the creative imagination, one of the senses is sharpened by the absence of another. The olfactory dimension is here powerfully supplemented by the tactile (“cover’d up in leaves”) and the auditory; the poems asks us, for example, to hear the murmuring of flies in the line “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves”, which M. H. Abrams identifies as an example of “Keats’s iconicity”, his “seeming mimicry of sound by sound”51. One might therefore imagine an artistic performance or “multisensory experience” (in the sense that Obrist and Velasco define it) where these lines are recited in a space with controlled stimuli, such as a dark room infused with floral perfume derived from the different flowers evoked in the passage. This could be accompanied acoustically by an ambient soundscape mingling the nightingale’s song with the low “murmur” of flies, so that the listener might experience at first hand the physical sensation described in a line such as “Darkling I listen” (l. 51).

28Alternatively, one might imagine designing a “multisensory event” in which vision is not impaired, but rather altered and enhanced by an AR/VR headset transporting the participant to the “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” (l. 40) of a night-time forest. Substantial progress has recently been made in the development of multisensory head-mounted devices (HMDs) incorporating tactile/thermal and olfactory stimuli, such as the one developed by the Season Traveller research project of the National University of Singapore aiming to offer “immersive representations of physical environments” (in this case allowing users to virtually experience the sights, sound and smells of the different seasons)52. We might even imagine a separate dedicated space for each of the poem’s stanzas, to be discovered at the participants’ leisure, in the spirit of the so-called “Immersive Theater Model”, which plunges “audiences into sumptuous spaces and lets them choose where to go and what to see”; in this form of sensuously indulgent, participatory “environmental theater”, “spectators can chase after the actors, enjoying wordless, dance-heavy scenes, or linger alone in luxuriant rooms – reading letters, sniffing herbs” (as in the case of the successful Hitchcock-like adaptation of Macbeth, “Sleep no More”)53.

  • 54 N. Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, p. 184.
  • 55 N. Roe, John Keats, p. 324.
  • 56 J. N. Cox (ed.), Keats’s Poetry and Prose, p. 102.

29We may understandably resist such attempts to literalise poetic imagery or to materialise verbal art – perhaps even recoil at the thought of experiencing nature poetry through a futuristic headset evoking a science fiction film – but it is in this respect important to recall that, in the passage describing the “embalmed darkness” of the nightingale’s nocturnal forest, Keats deliberately exploits the tension between the palpable and the intangible so as to vividly appeal to the embodied imagination while essentially describing an out-of-body experience. As Noel Jackson puts it, Keats was “unique among Romantic poets in consistently yoking together the extremes of sensation and abstraction”54. And while the speaker in “Ode to a Nightingale” eventually rejects the mind-altering temptations of intoxication – personified by “Bacchus and his pards” (l. 32) and implied by the references to “hemlock” (l. 2) and “some dull opiate” (l. 3) in the deliciously hazy opening lines – in favour of the poetic imagination, it has recently been argued that Keats himself experienced heightened sensations under the influence of laudanum (a mixture of alcohol and opium) at the time he composed the poem, which Nicholas Roe identifies “as one of the greatest re-creations of a drug-inspired dream-vision in English literature”55. A “virtual” synaesthetic experience of “Ode to a Nightingale” – one allowing us to temporarily “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” (l. 21) our immediate circumstances – might, moreover, offer exciting new perspectives on Keats’s recurrent aesthetic concern with what he in 1818 termed the “material sublime”, suggesting a reflective experience that is firmly grounded in material phenomena, underlining the mutually implicated condition of the concrete and the ethereal, the sensible and the abstract. It might even be argued that such a “multisensory experience” is very much in the spirit of the poet who famously declared, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey of November 1817: “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”56.

30To a certain extent, multisensory poetic experimentation with novel technologies reminds us that in many places around the world poetry was, and continues to be, linked to oral culture, music, performance and dance. This was, for example, the objective of the innovative “Code/Poésie” exhibition held in Morges, Switzerland in 2020 as part of the interdisciplinary “Digital Lyric” project, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation, aiming to reconcile traditional reading practices with immersive experiences and cutting-edge technologies of the digital age in an international, multilingual setting. This successful exhibit featured a number of art installations enabling visitors of all ages to experience “poetry beyond the book” by enhancing physical awareness of the body and encouraging interaction with texts through various electronic interfaces and adapted exposition spaces. Aiming to reinvigorate the ways in which the senses engage with and experience poetry, the transmedial experiments on offer included poetic multimedia performances and readings, a 360° virtual reality poetry-film, digital calligraphy, and spaces allowing visitors to virtually create their own poems or poetry anthologies by reconfiguring texts using touch-screen interfaces and AI software, as well as to instantly visualise vocalising on a screen using audio visualisers (fig. 3)57.

Fig. 3 — «Le Voyage d’Orphée» (VR headset), exhibition Code/Poésie, Château de Morges 2020. © Lucas Martinez.

  • 58 D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 45.

31Multisensory and multimedial experimentation of this type does not estrange us from ourselves, as reactionary techno-dystopian fears would often have us believe, but rather enables us to engage with our bodies and senses in both familiar and novel ways. As David Abram remarks, “although contemporary neuroscientists study ‘synaesthesia’ – the overlap and blending of the senses – as though it were a rare or pathological experience to which only certain persons are prone (those who report ‘seeing sounds’, ‘hearing colors’, and the like), our primordial, preconceptual experience, as Merleau-Ponty makes evident, is inherently synaesthetic. The intertwining of sensory modalities seems unusual to us only to the extent that we have become estranged from our direct experience (and hence from our primordial contact with the entities and elements that surround us)”58. The suggestion that there might be fruitful interactions between poetry and multisensorial technology is not meant to imply that the latter is able to provide a more “truthful” or “vivid” experience of poetry – only that this form of creative experimentation makes possible different, de-familiarised experiences. Exploring the fertile overlap between multisensory multimedia and intersensory poetics is an important project because of what this reveals both about evolving reading practises and traditions, on the one hand, and our changing understanding of cross-modal correspondences and communal aesthetic experiences, on the other. If, as Susan Stewart has argued, “poetry makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity [and] sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence”, then we must also consider the ways in which polysensory digital media stimulates the embodied imagination and allows us to experience poetry in fresh ways while encouraging our creative participation in the crossing of sensory lines. Such a focus on the multimedial blending of the senses opens up new artistic and interpretative avenues reminding us that reading, performing and producing poetry is not only a matter of trying to make sense, but of sensing.

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Bibliografia

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, New York, Vintage Books, 1997.

Abrams, Meyer Howard, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, and Other Essays, New York, W. W. Norton, 2012.

Ackerman, Diane, A Natural History of the Senses, New York, Vintage Books, 1991.

Armstrong, Paul, How Literature Plays with the Brain. The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Babbitt, Irving, The New Laokoon. An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.

Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du mal, ed. by Jacques Dupont, Paris, Flammarion, 1991.

Butler, Shane, Purves, Alex (eds), Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013.

Chouillet, Anne-Marie, “Le Clavecin oculaire du P. Castel”, Dix-huitième siècle, 8 (1976), p. 141-166.

Collins, Billy, The Apple that Astonished Paris, Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 2006 [1988].

Cox, Jeffrey N. (ed.), Keats’s Poetry and Prose, London, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Ćwiek, Aleksandra et al., “The bouba/kiki Effect is Robust Across Cultures and Writing Systems”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377/1841 (2021), online: <https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0390>.

Dann, Kevin, Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1998.

Darwin, Erasmus, The Botanic Garden. A Poem, in Two Parts: Containing the Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants. With Philosophical Notes, London, Jones & Company, 1825.

Duffy, Patricia Lynn, “Synesthesia in Literature”, in The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 647-670.

Erhardt-Siebold, Erika von, “Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romanticism”, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 47/2 (1932), p. 577-592.

Franssen, Maarten, “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel. The Science and Aesthetics of an Eighteenth-Century Cause Célèbre”, Tractrix, 3 (1991), p. 15-77.

Gérard, Albert, L’idée romantique de la poésie en Angleterre. Étude sur la théorie de la poésie chez Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats et Shelley, Liège, Presses Universitaires de Liège, 1955.

Gessinger, Joachim, “Farbenhören und Tonsehen”, in Auge & Ohr. Studien zur Erforschung der Sprache am Menschen 1700-1850, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1994, p. 115-178.

Halmi, Nicholas (ed.), Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose. A Norton Critical Edition, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Halmi, Nicholas, Magnuson, Paul, Modiano, Raimonda (eds), Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. A Norton Critical Edition, New York, W. W. Norton, 2004.

Hankins, Thomas L., Silverman, Robert J. (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1995.

Holmes Duffy, Rosalind, Ocular Harpsichord: Colour-Sound Analogy at Large in The Enlightenment, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2018.

Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Emily Wilson, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Jackson, Noel, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Jewanski, Jörg, “Die Farblichtmusik Alexander Lászlós”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 60/1 (1997), p. 12-43.

Jewanski, Jörg, “Von der Farbe-Ton-Beziehung zur Farblichtmusik”, in Farbe – Licht – Musik. Synästhesie und Farblichtmusik, hrsg. von Jörg Jewanski, Natalia Sidler, Bern, Peter Lang, 2006, p. 131-209.

Jewanski, Jörg, Simner, Julia, Day, Sean A., Rothen, Nicolas, Ward, Jamie, “The ‘Golden Age’ of Synesthesia Inquiry in the Late Nineteenth Century (1876-1895)”, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 29/2 (2020), p. 175-202.

Jewanski, Jörg, Simner, Julia, Day, Sean A., Rothen, Nicolas, Ward, Jamie, “The Evolution of the Concept of Synesthesia in the Nineteenth Century as Revealed through the History of its Name”, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 29/3 (2020), p. 259-285.

Law, Jules David, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993.

Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.

Milner, Max, L’imaginaire des drogues: de Thomas de Quincey à Henri Michaux, Paris, Gallimard, 2000.

Newton, Isaac, Opticks. Or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, commentary by N. Humez, Palo Alto (CA), Octavo, 1998 [1704].

Nordau, Max, Degeneration, New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1895.

O’Malley, Glenn, “Literary Synesthesia”, The Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, 15/4 (1957), p. 391-411.

Preminger, Alex, Brogan, T. V. F. et al. (eds), “Synaesthesia”, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 1259-1260.

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., Hubbard, Eleanor M., “Synaesthesia – A Window into Perception, Thought and Language”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8/12 (2001), p. 3-34.

Reiman, Donald H., Fraistat, Neil (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Second Norton Critical Edition, New York/London, W. W. Norton, 2002.

Rimbaud, Arthur, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Paris, Flammarion, 2016.

Roe, Nicholas, John Keats. A New Life, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2012.

Sidhu, D. M., Pexman, P. M., “Five Mechanisms of Sound Symbolic Association”, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25 (2018), p. 1619-1643.

Simner, Julia, Hubbard, Edward M. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Simner, Julia, Mulvenna, Catherine et al., “Synaesthesia: The Prevalence of Atypical Cross-Modal Experiences”, Perception, 35/8 (2006), p. 1024-1033.

Spence, Charles, “Scent and the Cinema”, i-Perception, 11/6 (2020), p. 1-22.

Starr, Gabrielle G., Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience, Cambridge (MA)/London, MIT Press, 2015.

Stewart, Susan, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Velasco, Carlos, Obrist, Marianna, Multisensory Experiences: Where the Senses Meet Technology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020.

Verna, Marisa, Le sens du plaisir. Des synesthésies proustiennes, Bern, Peter Lang, 2013.

Ward, Jamie, “Synaesthesia: A Distinct Entity that is an Emergent Feature of Adaptive Neurocognitive Differences”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 374/1787 (2019), online: <https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0351>.

Wellek, Albert, “Farbenharmonie und Farbenklavier: ihre Enstehungsgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert”, Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie, 94 (1935), p. 347-375.

Wellek, Albert, “Das Doppelempfinden im 18. Jahrhundert”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literatur-Wissenschaft, 14 (1936), p. 75-102.

Zunshine, Lisa (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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Note

1 J. N. Cox (ed.), Keats’s Poetry and Prose, p. 442.

2 A. Preminger, T. V. F. Brogan et al. (eds), “Synaesthesia”, p. 1259. The British spelling of the term (“synaesthesia”), as opposed to the American spelling (“synesthesia”), is adopted throughout this paper, except when the latter occurs in a direct quotation.

3 For a recent discussion of the phenomenology of synaesthesia, see: J. Ward, “Synaesthesia”.

4 Having said that, V. S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard note that “synaesthesia is purported to be more common in artists, poets and novelists” (“Synaesthesia”, p. 17). On the prevalence of synaesthesia, see: J. Simner, C. Mulvenna et al., “Synaesthesia”. For a comprehensive overview of the current field, see: J. Simner, E. M. Hubbard (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia.

5 G. O’Malley, “Literary Synesthesia”.

6 P. L. Duffy, “Synesthesia in Literature”, p. 647.

7 On the complex history of the term “synaesthesia”, see: J. Jewanski et al., “The Evolution of the Concept of Synesthesia in the Nineteenth Century as Revealed through the History of its Name”.

8 In the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman, Emily Wilson translates the siren’s seductive singing against which Circe warns Odysseus as “piercing songs” (XII., l. 45) and “honeyed song” (XII., l. 186); Homer, The Odyssey, p. 302 and 307. On synaesthesia and the poetry of Greek Antiquity, see S. Butler, A. Purves (eds), Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses.

9 Quoted in J. D. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism, p. 30.

10 Quoted in G. O’Malley, “Literary Synesthesia”, p. 391.

11 A. Ćwiek et al., “The bouba/kiki Effect is Robust Across Cultures and Writing Systems”. See also: D. M. Sidhu, P. M. Pexman, “Five Mechanisms of Sound Symbolic Association”.

12 On Proust and synaesthesia, see M. Verna, Le sens du plaisir.

13 “Like prolonged echoes that merge from far away / Into a deep, dark unity, / Vast as the night and as the light, / Scents and colors and sounds respond to one another” (l. 5-8; my translation); Ch. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, p. 62 sq.

14 “O mystic metamorphosis / Of all my senses fused into one! / Her breath makes music, / And her voice perfume” (l. 21-24; my translation); Ch. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, p. 89 sq.

15 Quoted in P. L. Duffy, “Synesthesia in Literature”, p. 651. See also M. Milner, L’imaginaire des drogues.

16 D. Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, p. 291.

17 A. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes.

18 See J. Jewanski et al., “The ‘Golden Age’ of Synesthesia Inquiry in the Late Nineteenth Century (1876-1895)”.

19 M. Nordau, Degeneration, p. 22.

20 I. Babbitt, The New Laokoon, p. 174 sq.

21 I. Newton, Opticks.

22 J. D. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism, p. 30.

23 E. Darwin, The Botanic Garden.

24 Ibid., p. 176.

25 Ibid., p. 177.

26 Quoted in E. von Erhardt-Siebold, “Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romanticism”, p. 579.

27 See J. Jewanski, “Von der Farbe-Ton-Beziehung zur Farblichtmusik”.

28 Rousseau wrote that Castel was “fou mais bonhomme au deumeurant” and Diderot described him as “un certaine brame noir, fort original, moitié sensé, moitié fou”; quoted in Th. L. Hankins, R. J. Silverman (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, p. 248, n. 15 and p. 248 sq., n. 16.

29 N. Halmi, P. Magnuson, R. Modiano (eds), Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, p. 18, n. 6.

30 Th. L. Hankins, R. J. Silverman (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, p. 76.

31 Quoted in E. von Erhardt-Siebold, “Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romanticism”, p. 578.

32 Th. L. Hankins, R. J. Silverman (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, p. 80.

33 Ibid.

34 A.-M. Chouillet, “Le Clavecin oculaire du P. Castel”, p. 146. On Castel and the eighteenth-century controversies regarding coloured hearing, see also: J. Gessinger, “Farbenhören und Tonsehen”; R. Holmes Duffy, Ocular Harpsichord; M. Franssen, “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel”; A. Wellek, “Das Doppelempfinden im 18. Jahrhundert” and “Farbenharmonie und Farbenklavier”.

35 Th. L. Hankins, R. J. Silverman (eds), Instruments and the Imagination, p. 82.

36 N. Halmi (ed.), Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, p. 88 sq.

37 A ground-breaking performance of Prometheus at the Yale School of Music in 2010, a century after its premiere, and the accompanying documentary can be viewed at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3B7uQ5K0IU>.

38 J. Jewanski, “Die Farblichtmusik Alexander Lászlós”.

39 See Ch. Spence, “Scent and the Cinema”.

40 D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 124.

41 M. H. Abrams, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, p. 32.

42 Ibid., p. 2.

43 B. Collins, The Apple that Astonished Paris, p. 58.

44 On Neuroaesthetics and the Neurohumanities, see for example: G. G. Starr, Feeling Beauty; L. Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies.

45 P. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain, p. ix-x.

46 C. Velasco, M. Obrist, Multisensory Experiences, p. 4 sq.

47 Ibid., p. 7.

48 Cf. <https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/sgF5ivv105ukhA>.

49 J. N. Cox (ed.), Keats’s Poetry and Prose, p. 458.

50 Ibid., p. 459.

51 M. H. Abrams, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, p. 35.

52 C. Velasco, M. Obrist, Multisensory Experiences, p. 43 sq.; a video demonstration of the headset can be viewed at <https://youtu.be/vTqqhIaYeIE>.

53 Cf. <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/theater/sleep-no-more-reopens.html>.

54 N. Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, p. 184.

55 N. Roe, John Keats, p. 324.

56 J. N. Cox (ed.), Keats’s Poetry and Prose, p. 102.

57 Cf. <https://lyricalvalley.org/digital-lyric-exposition/>.

58 D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 45.

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Indice delle illustrazioni

Credits Fig. 1 — Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, no318 (Léon Vanier, Paris, 1888).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/edl/docannexe/image/4009/img-1.jpg
File image/jpeg, 512k
Credits Fig. 2 — Satirical print of Castel’s “Ocular Harpsichord”, by Charles Germain Aubin.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/edl/docannexe/image/4009/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 237k
Credits Fig. 3 — «Le Voyage d’Orphée» (VR headset), exhibition Code/Poésie, Château de Morges 2020. © Lucas Martinez.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/edl/docannexe/image/4009/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 126k
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Notizia bibliografica

Philip Lindholm, «“A Light in Sound, a Sound-Like Power in Light”: Poetry, Synaesthesia & Multimedia»Études de lettres, 319 | 2022, 77-103.

Notizia bibliografica digitale

Philip Lindholm, «“A Light in Sound, a Sound-Like Power in Light”: Poetry, Synaesthesia & Multimedia»Études de lettres [Online], 319 | 2022, online dal 05 juin 2023, consultato il 13 janvier 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/edl/4009; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/edl.4009

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Philip Lindholm

University of Lausanne

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