Color Association

[plumtreeblossom]

I am nothing so much as a patchwork quilt of idiosyncrasies, one of the odder ones being that I tend to associate people I know (in person) with a color or color pattern. The association forms unconsciously; instantly with some people, later on with others if it takes longer to get a feel for their color.

I also do this with numbers, letters of the alphabet, and months of the year. Today is February (pink) 19, (white + deep purple) 2005 (yellow+white+white+blue).
With people, there’s a wider variety. Many overlap or double. As an example, I’ll use people on my LJ friendlist. If I you don’t see yourself here, it only means I’ve never met you in person or I haven’t (yet!) hung out with you enough for a color to form. These colors are:

alfie1981 -- White
androidqueen -- Midnight Blue
audioboy -- Chrome
bacall -- Seriously Bright Yellow
beana_1977 -- Magenta and Turquoise
bex77 -- Baby Pink
chanaleh -- Deep Orange
cometsong -- Green (all shades, depending on mood)
derspatchel -- Manila or Off-white
desultor -- Glittery Red
dpolicar -- Navy
earthling177 -- Sky Blue
epilimnion -- Spring Green
espressojim -- Black
gilana -- Olive
gringoddess -- White and Green, sort of gingham
guxx -- Oxford Blue
heliopsis -- Goldenrod
infinitehotel -- Forest Green
jason237 -- Silver
jimmystagger -- Black and White check (racing flag pattern)
jmspencer -- Yellow/Black tartan (it’s that shirt…)
kalisti23 -- Leafy Green
lillibet -- Burgundy
lordfeepness -- Orange
mafaldarose -- Rose
majes -- Red!
minkrose -- Darker Red, ribboned with Black
miss_chance -- Chocolate
muffyjo -- Baby Blue
petra_quince -- Peach
pheromone -- sometimes Sand, sometimes Purple
quilla -- Saffron
scholargipsy -- previously Blue, now Cherry Blossom (Nihon=pink, to me)
shayr22 -- Baby Blue
tcb -- Desert Golds and Oranges
wellstar -- Oxford Gray

I have to wonder if anyone else does this in their heads.

Comments

[saturn939.livejournal.com]

People tend to associate indigo and yellow with me. I dunno if they do that because of my journal colors, or if I've made my journal colors reflect what people think.

-Dej

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

We'll have to hang out when you're in town sometime so I can see if I agree with them. :-)

[saturn939.livejournal.com]

Haha, I'm totally in Boston right now (you can read the first part of my adventure in my latest entry). However, I'm leaving around 2 or 3, alas. Next time, next time! I'm sure I'll be up in April for the Charlie Brown play.

-Dej

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder if anyone else does this in their heads.

I do! Words (and individual letters) and numbers all have colors in my head. In fact, one of the ways I choose words while writing is doing an intuitive visual calculus in my head, choosing the words that "look" right together.

Glad I'm not the only crazy. :)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

You have a wonderful way of making me feel normal!
:-D

[androidqueen.livejournal.com]

vikash just made fun of me because i told him about my path of numbers through the forest.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm? Path of numbers?

[tcb.livejournal.com]

hee! that's kind of cool.. is it something akin to auras that you see? or just a sense of appropriate color?

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

It's just a sense, really. Yours are the desert tones because when I think of you I think of BurningMan. People's colors are nothing I can see, just some thing I feel or have felt coming from them in one way or another.

I've known 2 people who claim to see auras. One of them I believed, because her body language reflected very genuine responses when my aura was, presumably, a color indicating something bad. It was someone I worked at MITP with briefly, and she was an accountant rather than a "professional" psychic or anything. So I do believe some people can see auras, even though I can't.

[minkrose]

odd, you picked the colours I put myself in on my friends list. They're not my favourite colours (purple and black) but they are the ones I associate with myself.

My best friend in middle school did this EXACT same thing. Numbers had colours, people had colours, emotions... everythign. I have some of that written down somewhere - I'd be curious to see if you picked similar colours.
Personally, I never quite got it. My brain doesn't do anything like that.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Even though you wear mostly black (at least that I've seen), there's a deep red quality to you.

[minkrose]

My closet is grey, black, and a few scattered purples and blues (it really is - I'll take a picture at some point, because it's funny). I used to own mostly coloured clothing, so I started buying black clothing but then I outgrew everything except the blacks. I'm working my way back to a better balance, now. I think I need to own more red clothing. I always wanted to, but it seemed so... adventurous and daring and not me. But it feels more like me, now. Thank you for pointing this out. I'm not sure I would have noticed on my own.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

synaesthesia

There's the word I was looking for. I almost wish I had that, temporarily, just to see what it's like. Particularly the version where words have tastes.

[epilimnion.livejournal.com]

I actually have associations of color, mood, personality, with musical pitch and timbre. Not in a synaesthesia way, but in that each musical pitch has a *personality* for me. Same things with keys, scales, intervals, etc. Maybe it's a composer thing. After working so intimately with these things and devoting so much thought to them, they have acquired all sorts of traits in my mind. of course, this is not a new concept. Especially before equal temperment tuning, each key really did sound distinct, so they acquired associated moods. ("d minor, the saddest of all keys"). And the Greeks of course had modes, which were different kinds of scales, each associated with different effects on one's psyche.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I can totally imagine that. :-)

Interesting

[espressojim.livejournal.com]

All of my music classes emphasized feeling a mood and associating it with a chord type (wrong word, it's been too long). Then, all you had to do was pick the root out, and you knew where you were.

So, minor key feels sort of sad. But diminished feels really depressed. And augmented felt like you were kinda floaty/spacey/in the clouds. So, if you can identify how a chord makes you feel, you're good to go.

It didn't hurt in high school when my AP music teacher would screech and whoop over the chords he was playing. The man truely came across as incredibly insane at times, but I think he did it just to keep us awake and aware.

Any time you weren't paying attention, he would say something like "So, Jim, obviously this progression is in the key of WWWAAAAABBAAAA! WHOOOP-SHAAAAAAABAAAAAA!" You'd inevitably jump out of your seat, shocked back into total awareness.