Joe Wheeler's Musical Synesthesia

Gentle Laviedaloca Science Reader,

What follows is an essay I wrote back in 2012 about one of my best friends, Joe Wheeler. It was my final paper for a student-taught college class on one of Joe and my favorite bands, Radiohead. I conducted the interviews with him over Skype, as he was doing Peace Corps all the way over in Mongolia! But that's another story... Enjoy!!

The Colors of Radiohead

Joe Wheeler, a lad twenty-three years young hailing from Eugene, Oregon, was born with many gifts. He’s well-mannered, thoughtfully spoken, has keyhole-slits for pupils, and spits raps like a baseball player with a mouth full of sunflower seeds (bars!). But the focus of this paper will be another of Joe’s gifts, and how it relates to one of his favorite bands. Namely, his audio-visual synesthesia and the colors he sees when he listens to the music of Radiohead.

Let’s set the stage for exploring Joe’s superpower with a little personal history. Joe first started seeing colors when he heard music as young as he can remember. He didn’t realize this was a rather rare phenomenon until a friend’s psychologist father introduced him to the term “synesthesia” as a young teenager. The term is applied to people who experience an involuntary combination of multiple senses, although it encompasses the mixture of “ideas” with senses as well (there are those who see words or numbers as colored, for example). Joe describes hearing colors as akin to recalling memories, “they don’t obscure my field of vision; they are present in addition to everything else and I can choose to focus on them if I want.” Radiohead is a particularly chromatic band for Joe, and he believes his deep love for them comes as a result.

Over time Joe has been able to identify certain patterns which explain why he sees a given color associated with a song. As part of this, Joe uses the concept of the “driving sound” in a song. The driving sound may be prominent or blended into the background, but there is always a certain sense that it is the sound which gives a song its distinctive feel. With this concept in hand, we can create a conversion table which represents an inexact mapping between sound and color for Joe:

Joe's Head, inside of which many beautiful colors live

Color	Driving Sound
Pink	80’s synth/Specific high-pitched background tone
Red	Prominent Fast Electric Guitar (ie Heavy metal, Guns N Roses, Jimmy Hendrix)
Yellow	Folk/Country/Bluegrass
Green	Spacey Ambient Synthesizers/Difficult to Categorize *Interestingly, no Radiohead songs are green (with minor exception=Treefingers)
Light Blue	Background Acoustic Guitar (“softly-plucked, dream-like, ambient”)
Dark Blue	Background Electric Guitar/Things that are reminiscent of the Ocean/Reverb and Delay
Brown	Prominent Rock Guitar (“strings plucked with more intention and loudly”)
Dark Brown/Black	Ultracerebral & Otherworldly/Painful and Sorrowful Songs/Distorted Bass
Gold	Things that Should Sound Gold! (“Treasure chest opening”)
Purple, Orange, White	Difficult to Categorize and Rare

It is important to understand this conversion table is rough, as we will see in many specific song examples. I based it purely upon one two-hour Skype interview, so hopefully it will gain refinement as Joe provides feedback. It’s also evident that there is a guitar-bias, perhaps because Joe plays guitar, and therefore naturally tends to think of songs in relation to the instrument. Keeping it in mind, though, we have a starting point to explore Radiohead’s albums as they appear to Mr. Joe Wheeler, synesthete extraordinaire!

Instead of going chronologically in terms of Radiohead’s album releases, let’s go chronologically in terms of Joe’s introduction to the albums. Joe was first introduced to Radiohead in the sixth grade, as his two 6’10” older brothers were very into the band at the time. However, Joe (evening out at a mere 6’4”) didn’t find their music appealing until a bit later in high school when he would play boom box-basketball in a beautiful park after school amongst friends. Once, one of these friends, James Bean, brought Hail to the Thief and they played to that album for many days straight. Joe found this album’s sound very surreal and loved the stark contrast it brought to the very comfortable and familiar world they were playing in.

To Joe, every song on Hail to the Thief  lies somewhere in the continuum of colors that one might place in a spectrum between yellow and black. That is, the songs are light yellow to dark yellow to bronze, gold, brown and black. Joe hypothesizes a major reason for this being that the timbre of the guitar on the album is very bluegrassy, a type of music he often sees as yellow. He cites “Go to Sleep” as a perfect example of this guitar timbre.

The third song on Hail to the Thief, “Backdrifts,” provides a great example of the concept of the “driving sound” on a song as well as a sense for how sophisticated the color Joe sees can be. The driving sound for the song is the strange distortion which is present from the very beginning and remains in the background throughout. Joe cites it as responsible for the “black with a bunch of white particles which are bouncing really fast” he sees.

Troubling from the interpreter’s standpoint is “We Suck Young Blood,” which doesn’t have any guitar in sight, and yet sounds brown to Joe. Although I did not ask him about this song in our interview, I can gain some footing by considering what the driving sound of the song is. To my ear it’s the slow, low-pitched piano chords, which certainly are played with the intention Joe speaks of when he hears brown. So perhaps the trouble here is merely caused by our confinement to thinking in terms of guitar.

Hail to the Thief

Hail to the Thief Song	Color
2+2=5	Bronze
Sit Down Stand Up	Black due to the gloominess and darkness of the song, as well as the pain in Thom’s voice. (Compare to “Sail to the Moon”)
Backdrifts	Black void with white particles (Compare with “Everything in its Right Place”)
Go to Sleep	Yellow (Bluegrassy guitar)
Where I End and You Begin	Brown
We Suck Young Blood	Brown
The Gloaming	Black
There There	A dark yellow/bronze/copper color
I Will	Dark Brown (painful song)
A Punchup at a Wedding	Brown
Myxomatosis	Black due to driving low distorted bass (Compare to “National Anthem”)
Scatterbrain	Gold
A Wolf at the Door	Light Yellow

After Hail to the Thief, Joe went on to listen to OK Computer and Kid A, although he has yet to this day set ears upon Amnesiac (I know, right!!!). As an album, Joe doesn’t particularly love OK Computer (though he loves “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” “Exit Music” and “Karma Police”), and said it is mostly blue. This is believable from our conversion table, as the album is very rock-based with lots of driving coming from background guitars. Although we didn’t go song by song, I asked about “Paranoid Android” (Brown due to prominent rock guitar), “Exit Music” (also brown) and “No Surprises” (Yellow because it reminds him of a song featuring similar sounding bells by The Eels—giving a sense of the complexity and interconnectedness of Joe’s experience).

For Joe, three of Kid A’s ten tracks are black or nearly black, and he had always thought of this as a very dark album. Upon inspection, however, it became apparent that the album is divided into black at the beginning and blue at the end, both with one pink song mixed in. The two halves are separated by “Treefingers,” the lone Radiohead song containing green (though a very pale and yellow-green at that) which makes perfect sense given green’s conversion as “spacey-ambient synthesizers.” Also worth noting is the black Joe sees due to the distorted low bass that runs through “National Anthem” and its similarity to “Myxomatosis” driving bass which Joe sees as the same color.

Kid A Song	Color
Everything in its Right Place	Black void with white particles (Compare with “Backdrifts”)
Kid A	Pink
National Anthem	Black due to driving low distorted bass (Compare to “Myxomatosis”)
How to Disappear Completely	Such a dark brown it’s almost black (Compare to “Sail to the Moon”)
Treefingers	Super-muted yellow/green
Optimistic	Ocean Blue (but lighter than “Bloom”)
In Limbo	Really Dark Blue—hint of purple
Idioteque	Pink (Compare to songs on In Rainbows)
Morning Bell	Ocean Blue (Compare to “Bloom”)
Motion Picture Soundtrack	Lighter Blue

When In Rainbows came out in 2007, Joe said it was “like meeting a true-love—It seemed as if the members of Radiohead had gotten together and asked themselves ‘If we can piece together just the right combination of sound to make Joe Wheeler the happiest, what would it be?’” Ironically, In Rainbows is, with the exception of a song, just one color! Pink. Joe says it’s probably due to the specific tone and timbre of the guitar that’s used on these songs. He pointed to the beginning of “House of Cards” as isolating the way this particular guitar sounds. The exception to the album is “All I Need” which appears to Joe as a dark brown due to the pain in Thom’s voice.

King of Limbs, Radiohead’s most recent album, begins with two songs of an ocean-blue color. The driving sound on “Bloom” is a high keyboard, which does sound similar to the keyboard on “Morning Bell,” perhaps explaining why Joe sees the same color on the two songs. “Morning Mr. Magpie” is driven by (what I think is) a background electric guitar, giving cause from our conversion table to understand why he sees it blue. Truthfully, though, “Bloom” and “Morning Mr. Magpie” do not share so much in common to my ear, so I’ll be clarifying with Joe why he sees them as the same color. “Little by Little” is sensibly brown, as the driving force is a prominent rock guitar (I can definitely hear a resemblance to “Paranoid Android,” for example). Your guess is as good as mine as to why there exists a grey in the blue Joe sees for “Feral.” Joe himself often struggles to comprehend exactly why he sees what he sees. “Lotus Flower” contains those pink high tones, although I would have said its driving sound is the low synth line. At first one might think it’s hard to know what “should” sound gold, but after listening to “Codex,” I must say it does (not to mention it features a similar grandiose-ness to Thom’s voice as “Scatterbrain,” the other gold Radiohead song). Finally, “Give Up the Ghost” and “Separator” both are easily identified to contain the distinctive “high-tones” that produce pink.

King of Limbs Song	Color
Bloom	Ocean-like Blue (Compare to Morning Bell)
Morning Mr. Magpie	Ocean-like Blue
Little by Little	Brown
Feral	Greyish Blue “like that of a desktop computer, or blue-colored gears”
Lotus Flower	Pink
Codex	Gold
Give Up the Ghost	Pink
Separator	Pink

I think it’s safe to say that there exist real patterns to Joe’s synesthesia which can be understood by the lay a-synesthete. Some are much easier to comprehend than others (ie the browns of “Paranoid Android” and “Exit Music,” vs. the blues of “Bloom” and “Morning Mr. Magpie”) not to mention the specific hues and textures that Joe experiences. I think part of the difficulty lies in the challenge of expressing sound qualities in words, and so with more experience actually listening to songs and learning which color Joe associates with them, it would be easier to predict what he sees. It’s also apparent that there is subjectivity to Joe’s visions that cannot be overcome by study. The colors he sees are intertwined with his own memories (ie “No Suprises”), and all sorts of variables that are uniquely Joe.

I found it fascinating to learn the connections that Joe sees between songs and then to hear them for myself. Discussing music with him might be likened to analyzing a text by looking for themes, only the text a song and the themes colors. It’s phenomenal to consider that when looking for themes in books one must normally think and struggle a bit to find them, and yet to a synesthete they might jump out immediately, as an exquisitely detailed picture. I also loved being able to correctly predict what color Joe sees on songs, as I was able to do with much higher precision than pure chance would allow. Our shared love of Radiohead made discussing this topic a pure joy, and I’ll conclude with Joe’s description of the band: “It’s as if they have a big canvas and are painting layers of sound onto it.”

Radiohead's music creates more colors in Joe's head than this photo suggests