COLORS AND MUSIC

Evening Star, Issue 18259, 26 April 1923, Page 4

COLORS AND MUSIC

REMARKABLE AUCKLAND BOY. TINTS AND TONES CONNECTED. “Oh, mummy, let’s go and play that on the piano,’’ cried a little boy named Gordon who lives nut at Mount Eden, when ho beard an empty kerosene tin thrown down on the roadway with a peculiar musical sound. And (says the Auckland ‘Star’) he told his mother the notes to strike. If you strike the note “A” on the piano and ask him what color it is ho will answer without the slightest hesitation “blue.” And if you point to the green plush of the music stool and say “ What is the sound of that?” he will at once strike “F.” Also lie has “note names” and “color names” for people and objects. “Not animals alone, but shrubs and trees have speech for him, as the poet savs. Eight years old, this little chap has an almost uncanny faculty of juggling _ with sound and color that gains a double interest when one reads of how scientists in the Old World are now busy experiment ing in the same direction. When he was four months old something about bis eyes led his parents, who then lived in the South, to consult two specialists. One said the child was totally blind in one eye, while there was just a faint sign of life in the nerve of the other, but be did not think there was sufficient life to enable' the nerve to revive. The other specialist was emphatic that the little life apparent in the one eye would probably develop, and the child would be able to find his way about. The latter prediction proved true, and Gordon can now (with limitations) scamper about, and can even read letters about a quarter of an inch high.

ACUTE COLOR SENSE.

But strangely enough the little fellow has always been able to distinguish colors, and he has a far finer appreciation of the delicate shades of difference between the colors than the ordinary mortal possesses. Tho other day, for instance, two grownups wore discussing the color of a new motor car—something quite different from tho ordinary car color. It might be a green, yellow, or half a dozen oilier variations of something about that tint. Gordon without any hesitation pronounced it “fawny-yellow,” which exactly hit it off. More remarkable still is tho way ho connects colors and sounds. Of course, he never heard of tho experiments that scientists have made, and tho contention of a celebrated person that, by means of an instrument that showed colors instead of playing notes, he could produce tho same effect aa that which would bo achieved if a pioco of music were actually played. When quite a child Gordon was playing with some clothes pegs, just the ordinary wooden things that kiddies delight to get hold of—and lose. One day ho surprised his people by saying that he had lost his “white peg.” This was (he first (hey had heard of such a thing, but tho little follow is full of quaint conceits. Questions led to tho discovery that he had color names for all his pegs. The white one was subsequently found, and just out of curiosity it was marked “white” by one of his parents, and sure enough the child could always tell it from any of the others. Then other names followed. Holding one particular peg in one hand, ho, strikes the others against it in turn, and from the sound emitted ho names and knows them all. Even more remarkable still is the fact that he can tell any gramophone record in the cabinet by merely holding it up and tapping It with his fingers. In the house collection there are only two of the records that have exactly the same note. Of course, the difference between the others is so minute as to bo quite inaudible to ordinary mortals, but Gordon picks them out with uncanny certainty. HIS MUSICAL GIFT. Almost before he could walk lie climbed to tho piano stool and began picking out notes. One day his parents were surprised to hear someone picking out on the piano Dvorak’s ‘Humoresque.’ He had heard it on tho gramophone, and there he was sitting at tho piano and with his baby hand reproducing the tune ho had heard the day before on the gramophone. At first ho used to talk about tho “black potes” and the “white notes.”- Even

then he used to astonish people by accurately naming the combination of ‘ whites and “blacks” when a chord was struck, no matter how complicated, and he was just ns unerring in naming the most complicated discords. One night ho was told the proper names for the notes, and next morning when questioned ho remembered them without a fault. He can tell exactly the note pounded by anything Unit can make a noise. Motor horns ho can identify with absolute certainty, and at once reproduces them on the piano. Some of the sounds lie describes as being composed of two or more notes. A rather peculiar instance of this happened one evening. A very musical friend asked what note a certain rn'amophono record ended on, and the child said A and C (or whatever the combination happened to he), but the musician did not agree at all, and maintained it was some other note, and a single one at that. Going to the piano, the musician struck his note, but got nothing like the last note of the gramophone record. Then the child struck the two notes ho had mentioned, and the musician admitted that the reproduction was perfect. NOTES AND THEIR HUES. His system, or perhaps it would be better to say his habit, connecting sound and colors is. as follows, the notes being those of the pianoforte:—A, blue; F, green ; B, pale yellow ; G, pale pink ; D, brown; E, black; A sharp, white; If flat, grey; B flat, whit*; F sharp, silver; and C sharp, light brown. If you ask him the “sound” of red, ho will say it has none; “it is too hot.” Too young to explain how or why he associates colors and sound, ho nevertheless emphatically does it, and ever since he could speak ho has spoken of tho two as though they were interchangeable terms. Apart from his defective vision, Gordon is just an ordinary happy youngster, but now that lie is of an age where instruction in the everyday schooling that every boy must go through, Ins parents are naturally somewhat at a loss as to how and where ho should bo educated.