Originally I was going to post another possible example of Cordato’s Law, in this case UNC researchers using the Body-Mass index to argue that professional athletes are really overweight. The Center for Consumer Freedom regularly uses data on “obese” professional athletes to show the flaw in the oversimplified “obesity” test.
But I decided to post this instead ? it’s the story that follows the one about the UNC research.
Swiss scientists have now come across the unusual case of a woman who not only “sees” musical notes as different colours, but also associates different tones with specific tastes.
Reporting in the journal Natural, the scientists describe the woman as a 27-year-old professional musician of average intelligence.
“Whenever she hears a specific musical interval, she automatically experiences a taste on her tongue that is consistently linked to that particular interval,” the scientists write. (A tonal interval is the difference in pitch between two tones.)
“She doesn’t imagine the taste, she really tastes it,” one of the researchers, Michaela Esslen of the University of Zurich told Reuters News Agency. Depending on the tonal intervals, a part of symphony could be bittersweet, salty, sour or creamy.
One can only imagine her reaction to Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (listen to a sample; the piece named after the work was completed ? it wasn’t intended from the beginning to memorialize the nuclear attack). Here’s one possibility.
