How Wassily Kandinsky's synaethesia changed art

The artist, celebrated in today's Google doodle, created the world's first truly abstract paintings

Wassily Kandinsky's 148 birthday is celebrated in today's Google doodle.

Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world's first truly abstract paintings, but his artistic ambition went even further. He wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. He removed all recognisable subjects and objects from his art around 1911, but he also achieved a new pictorial form of music.

Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthesia, a harmless condition that allows a person to appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses simultaneously. In his case, colours and painted marks triggered particular sounds or musical notes and vice versa. The involuntary ability to hear colour, see music or even taste words results from an accidental cross-wiring in the brain that is found in one in 2,000 people, and in many more women than men.

Synaesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by "a studious blind man" claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet.

The idea that music is linked to visual art goes back to ancient Greece, when Plato first talked of tone and harmony in relation to art. The spectrum of colours, like the language of musical notation, has long been arranged in stepped scales, so it is still unclear whether or not Beethoven, who called B minor the black key and D major the orange key, or Schubert, who saw E minor as "a maiden robed in white with a rose-red bow on her chest", were real synaesthetes.

There is still debate whether Kandinsky was himself a natural synaesthete, or merely experimenting with this confusion of senses in combination with the colour theories of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Rudolf Steiner, in order to further his vision for a new abstract art.

Sceptics have dismissed synaesthesia as nothing more than subjective invention, like a bad case of metaphor affliction - after all, anyone can feel blue, see red, eat a sharp cheese or wear a loud tie. Recently, however, a group of neuroscientists has been able to prove that synaesthetes do indeed "see" sound. A series of brain scans showed that, despite being blindfolded, synaesthetes showed "visual activity" in the brain when listening to sounds. Now all that is left is to find the gene that may be responsible.

Despite the lack of medical proof for Kandinsky's synaesthesia, the correlation between sound and colour was a lifelong preoccupation for the artist. He recalled hearing a strange hissing noise when mixing colours in his paintbox as a child, and later became an accomplished cello player, which he said represented one of the deepest blues of all instruments. Sean Rainbird, curator of Tate's forthcoming Kandinsky exhibition, says, "My feeling is that he was quite a natural at it. To have painted the largest work he ever made, Composition VII, in just three days, shows that this language was quite internalised."

Kandinsky discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow: "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." In 1911, after studying and settling in Germany, he was similarly moved by a Schoenberg concert and finished painting Impression III (Konzert) two days later. The abstract artist and the atonal composer became friends, and Kandinsky even exhibited Schoenberg's paintings in the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich in the same year.

If Kandinsky had a favourite colour, it must have been blue: "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white." Despite his theories that the universe was in thrall to supernatural vibrations, auras and "thought-forms", many of which came from arcane, quasi-religious movements such as theosophy, Kandinsky's belief in the emotional potential of art is still convincing today. Our response to his work should mirror our appreciation of music and should come from within, not from its likenesses to the visible world: "Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings."

Kandinsky achieved pure abstraction by replacing the castles and hilltop towers of his early landscapes with stabs of paint or, as he saw them, musical notes and chords that would visually "sing" together. In this way, his swirling compositions were painted with polyphonic swathes of warm, high-pitched yellow that he might balance with a patch of cold, sonorous blue or a silent, black void. Rainbird describes how the artist used musical vocabulary "to break down the external walls of his own art".

After 1910, he split his work into three categories: Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions, often adding musical titles to individual pictures such as Fugue, Opposing Chords or Funeral March. He also conceived three synaesthetic plays combining the arts of painting, music, theatre and dance into Wagnerian total works of art or Gesamtkunstwerks, which were designed to unify all the senses.

Kandinsky undoubtedly led the European revival in synaesthesia but there are many other examples of sonic influence in modern art, from Munch's The Scream and Whistler's Nocturnes and Harmonies to Ezra Pound's cantos and T S Eliot's quartets. Yet Kandinsky's curious gift of colour-hearing, which he successfully translated onto canvas as "visual music", to use the term coined by the art critic Roger Fry in 1912, gave the world another way of appreciating art that would be inherited by many more poets, abstract artists and psychedelic rockers throughout the rest of the disharmonic 20th century. Here then are Kandinsky's guidelines so that you can visit Tate Modern and experience synaesthesia for yourself: "Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"

Students develop nail polish to detect date-rape drugs

When’s the last time you got a manicure that could also prevent date rape?  

The likely answer is never.But four college students claim they’ve come up with a way to do just that.

Undergraduate students at North Carolina State University – Ankesh Madan, Stephen Grey, Tasso Von Windheim and Tyler Confrey-Maloney – created a nail polish called “Undercover Colors” that changes color in the presence of common date rape drugs like Rohypnol, Xanax, and GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid).

To see if one of the drugs has been slipped into her drink, a woman has to stir it with her finger. Not exactly discreet (or good manners, or very hygienic), but arguably more stylish than similar inventions, like these coasters, cups and straws, that do the same thing.

“We wanted to focus on preventive solutions, especially those that could be integrated into products that women already use,” Madan told Higher Education Works in June. “All of us have been close to someone who has been through the terrible experience [of date rape], and we began to focus on finding a way to help prevent the crime.”

Critics says the clever concept and good intentions don’t add up to a product that actually empowers women.

The blog Feministing pointed out that date rape drugs “are not used to facilitate sexual assault all that often. While exact estimates vary, it’s safe to say that plain old alcohol is the substance most commonly used in drug-facilitated rape.”

“Well-intentioned products like anti-rape nail polish can actually end up fueling victim blaming,” wrote Tara Culp-Ressler of Think Progress. “Any college students who don’t use the special polish could open themselves up to criticism for failing to do everything in their power to prevent rape.”

The nail polish is yet another item to add to a growing list of gimmicky-seeming precautions that includes anti-rape underwear and pepper spray cameras which do little more than “delude” women into believing they’re safe from sexual violence, Feministing observed.

Another problem with the polish is that it distracts from real solutions to the problem. “I think a lot of the time we get focused on these new products because they’re innovative and they’re interesting, and it’s really cool that they figured out how to create nail polish that does this. But at the end of the day, are you having those tough conversations with students, and particularly men, who are at risk for committing sexual assault?” Tracey Vitchers, the board chair for Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER),told ThinkProgress. “Are you talking to young men about the importance of respecting other people’s boundaries and understanding what it means to obtain consent?”

Writing for Salon, Jenny Kutner questioned whether profits should be reaped from rape prevention. “Is this really a market we should continue to applaud entrepreneurs’ (notably male ones) tapping into? Or might these resources be better allocated trying to teach people not to rape?”

Still, others are enthusiastic about the idea. Earlier this year the four materials science and engineering majors won first place and took home $11,250 at NC State’s Lulu eGames, a student competition that which challenges students to design working solutions to real-world problems.  They also scored $100,000 from an investor who saw their product demo at the K50 Startup Showcase.