
How Walter Murch Merged “Apocalypse Now” and “Ride of the Valkyries” - pmcpinto
http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-i-tried-to-transplant-the-musical-heart-of-apocalypse-now
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fezz
"The problem turned out to be a classic case of synesthesia. ... Although
Leinsdorf’s performance of the “Valkyries” was rhythmically in synch with
Solti’s, at this moment Leinsdorf had emphasized the strings in his orchestral
balance, whereas at that same point Solti had chosen to emphasize the brasses,
which—I realized now only in retrospect—were responsible for synergizing that
wonderful acid blue of the ocean. In Leinsdorf’s recording, the strings were
soft and pillowy, and as a result the blue looked dead: The chemistry of the
image and sound worked against each other to the detriment of both."

If only we could hear both edits and compare.

~~~
joeyo
I wasn't aware that there were "universals" in synesthesia. Might not the
blues of the ocean have looked _better_ when paired with strings to another
synesthete or to the (presumably indifferent) mostly non-synesthetic audience?

~~~
btown
Wouldn't it be interesting if, culturally, we more often hear brass timbres
than string timbres when we are by a saturated blue ocean or looking at a
bright blue sky (tense action scenes in movies, on horn parts in the latin-
themed soundtracks to our summer vacations)? Then presumably someone with the
capacity for synesthesia could be statistically more likely to develop the
specific synesthesia in question.

It's virtually impossible to be quantitative about any of that, of course.

There's fMRI research being done on synesthesia [1], but I'm unaware of any
studies that go into the exact correlation between specific colors and
specific timbres.

[1]
[http://ist.ksc.kwansei.ac.jp/~nagata/nagata_lab_folder/nagat...](http://ist.ksc.kwansei.ac.jp/~nagata/nagata_lab_folder/nagata_lab/publication/pdf/ICCSA_takahashi.pdf)

