An odds ratio of about 4
Increased Prevalence of Synaesthesia in Musicians
June 17th, 2025
Via Center for Open Science: "There is convincing evidence for a relationship between synaesthesia and engagement in the visual arts, but the evidence with regards to music is sparser and mixed. For example, Rich et al. (2005) did not find that synaesthetes were more likely to be actively engaged in music as a hobby and did not report it as one of their strengths. Other studies have pointed to greater engagement in music by synaesthetes (Lunke & Meier, 2022; Ward et al., 2008), albeit with a qualification that the effect is particularly pronounced in certain synaesthetes (e.g., those synaesthetes for whom music, and other sounds, elicit visual experiences). The present study takes a somewhat different approach of investigating the prevalence of synaesthesia in musicians considering grapheme-color, sequence-space, and music tone - color. There are far fewer prevalence estimates for the latter owing to a lack of well validated methods for this type (i.e., based on an optimised cut-off between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes), and we use a recently published approach (Ward et al., 2024). In brief, we find an increased prevalence of all three kinds of synaesthesia amongst musicians. In a secondary analysis we show that synaesthesia is particularly prevalent in people who engage, at a high level (supplementing their income), in multiple creative pursuits (i.e., music + art) relative to one or none of these domains.
The fact that sequence-space synaesthesia (for days, months, and numbers) is over-represented in musicians may seem surprising given that it is not directly relevant to music. It suggests instead that there are skills and traits within most, if not all, types of synaesthesia that facilitate engagement and success in music. This has sometimes been referred to as a synaesthetic disposition (Ward, 2019) or a general synaesthetic trait (Rouw & Scholte, 2016). These differences might include greater mental imagery across multiple senses, greater attention-to-detail, and higher openness to experience. There is also evidence that heterogeneous groups of synaesthetes (not just those with sound/music inducers) perform better in tests of auditory perception such as detecting a tone in noise (Del Rio et al., 2024) and in memory for musical phrases (Mealor et al., 2020). It may still be the case that those individuals with music-color synaesthesia have important differences relative to other synaesthetes in measures that we have not been able to capture here. Previous research suggests that these music-color synaesthetes gravitate to certain music genres that are musically complex and layered (Ward et al., 2024). It may also be that they occupy different roles within a band or orchestra (e.g., leading or composing versus following), are more commercially successful, or more able to detect nuances missed by others (e.g., how a current performance differs from a previous one). The latter could be directly aided by being able to 'see' the music. These would be important measures to collect in future research.
There is a paucity of research on the prevalence of sound-color synaesthesia, but it is generally considered to be rarer than grapheme-color synaesthesia in both self-selected samples of synaesthetes (Ward & Simner, 2022) and from screening of opportunistic samples in the general population (Simner et al., 2006). Here we do not find that to be the case which requires further discussion (in non-musicians the prevalence of sound-color was 1.3% and that of grapheme-color was 0.2%). Firstly, our approach for classifying a person as having this type of synaesthesia does not rely solely on consistency but takes into account other measures (e.g., the overall palette of colors). This was necessitated by the fact that consistency is a less reliable discriminator for this type than others. Rather than a simple pass-fail, one could interpret this as different degrees of evidence for having this type of synaesthesia. Importantly, the finding of increased prevalence in musicians is robust against this. Whilst it is also conceivable that some participants are false positives (i.e., do not have synaesthesia) we minimised this by only sending the tests to participants who indicated that they had these kinds of experiences in the first place. Another possibility is that our non-musician control group are not truly representative of the general population (i.e., they contain more people engaged in music than might be expected perhaps at a hobby rather than semi-professional level).
In conclusion, we provide convincing evidence that synaesthesia, in various forms, is more prevalent amongst musicians."
