Colourless Spaces

[cpl_crud]

Hi all.
I thought I'd join the rash of Oekaki posts, mostly because I have abotu 50 minutes to kill at work and I don't have my laptop.
This is all striaght off the top of head, unedited, and will only take me 40 mintues to write. It may also get cut off mid-way should I get paged.

Nuff said.

------

Ah, that first vibration, as the bow hits the string, sending a familiar shuddering through the cello's neck and into mine.

An instant later, the sound reaches me; a wash of forest green in a room formerly pale blue.

My bow dances from string to string, bouncing playfully off the taught fibres. I can almost see the small clouds of rosin flying off the bow with each new contact.

As my left hand dances up and down the cello's neck, I begin to picture it in my mind. The steel grey of the neck, dissected by the hot, burning red of teh vibrating strings before they fade back into the background noise.
The cello's body; big, heavy, blue. It undulates with the bowstring, yet never changes from it's sea-like hue.
The reverberations bounce off the music room's walls, the green of the music tainted turquoise by the light blue of the room.

And, amidst this sea of colour, a faint, liliac breath, so dull that it seems afraid to even taint this technocolour symphony.

I remove the bow from the chello, and everything slowly returns to it's natural blue. The Lilac breath, however, releases itself.

I can't help but smile; she really didn't want to disturb the song... or maybe it was something else.

"L.. is somethign wrong, Lilly?"

An explosion of mauve words surrounds me, unique and fragile.

Most people speak bolder colours; men in shades of red, women mostly in vibrant yellows.

Only Hanako speaks to me in purple. A confused, scared purple that seems to take all of her effort to create.
If only she knew how beautiful her words looked.

"Nothing at all, my dear."

Try as I might, my words are the polar opposite to Hanako's, a confident, blistering yellow.

"I was thinking about how lovely you sound today..."

A short, almost unnoticeable inhalation of pink gives away Hanako's secret. I no longer have to feel her face to hear her blush; that little pink breath is her telltale sign. I doubt she even knows abotu it herself.

"Lilly... I don't... know what you mean..."

Her blush tints her purple voice, becoming a dark pink.

"In my world, there is precious little colour. I have never seen you, but I know what you look like..."
"Um... "
"I can tell... from your sounds. Every sound is unique. I want you to try something- close your eyes. Close them tight. Try to forget everything that you have ever seen.
"Every noise that has even been made has a colour to it. Most noises are unintelligible, and hence have dim, plain colours.
"Music, however, is focussed noise. Music colours my world, just like some people's voices.
"...just like your voice..."

I wait until her confused berathing settles back into her usual hue.

"Now... listen..."

Once more a glorious green issues forth from the red strings of the cello. This time, it's a dancing, spritely apple green, bouncing off the walls in a lively fashion, dragging some of the blue of the walls into the space of the room.

I play, and play, and play, until, at the very last moment, I see what I wanted to hear.

A rich indigo inhaltion of realisation.

"I... think I see it...
"I mean... I can't see it... but I can.
"Each sound... it has somewhere that it fits...
"It's beautiful. Thank you, Lilly..."

"My pleasure."

I can tell Hanako is impressed, but there is something else in her voice...
What is that?
It's not fear, or embarrassment, nor admiration.
Could it be... inspiration?

"Um, Lilly..."

"Yes, Hana-chan?"

"Um... I know I can't play... but... I want to help..."

Her voice is a wash of pink and purple; something I've never seen before. A swirling vortex of cosmic colour envelops me.

"My dear... you're helping just by being here..."

"That's not what I meant... I want... I want to make you colours...
"I want to make you sounds.
"You just showed me a taste of your world, and I want more."

My my, I've never seen her worked up like this before. Her usually dull colours are vibrant, pulsating with a longing bordering on addiction.

"Well well. There is one thing you could do. The school sorely needs someone passionate about sound..."

"Anything! Please, Lilly!"

I wonder... is this the right thing to do?

------

Urgh. Writing so much VN stuff screws with your ability to write prose, that's for sure.
Anyway, that was a little less time than I expected, about 25 minutes total, but I think I covered what I wanted to cover. And if my subtlety was a little to subtle at the end, yes, this is where Hanako gets her audiophilia from.

If you've got a good set of speakers of headphones, I highly recommend trying this out. Close your eyes for a good five minutes, then listen to some well recorded music. Not crappy MP3s, not some over-compressed (audio compression not data compression) pop crap. You'll notice a lot more than you usually will.

Or maybe that's jsut me. I dunno. Then again my headphones cost more than some people's entire sound systems :O

[Penguinmayhem]

Yeah, the tiny paragraphs are a bit annoying when you can't get out of them. But I think it works just perfectly for this. Wonderful piece.

[Aura]

Maybe my heart is made of sand or something, but the only thing i could think of is that Lilly shouldn't have the concept of colours at all.

[Penguinmayhem]

Taste?

[cpl_crud]

I think I jsut got the shits with her not being able to see... probably only a fraction of A22's pain with shizune though, I guess...


Also, I like to think that whilst Lilly has never seen colours, people has described them to her, and that's how she perceives the combination of sound and touch (and smell to a lesser degree), in order to make sense of her world.

[frumplstlskn]

Here's something interesting. Maybe she's synesthetic. Blind people can be synesthetic according to the wiki article. So, in essence she would know colour (quite vividly as you have used in your story), and it would be very related to her music and touch.

An interesting fact: I have number form synesthesia.

[TheHivemind]

Here's something interesting. Maybe she's synesthetic. Blind people can be synesthetic according to the wiki article. So, in essence she would know colour (quite vividly as you have used in your story), and it would be very related to her music and touch.

Holy crap, a perfectly legitimate explanation for the problem.

Thanks, internet!

In all seriousness, this was a good read and I dig it intensely.

[Aura]

Also, I like to think that whilst Lilly has never seen colours, people has described them to her, and that's how she perceives the combination of sound and touch (and smell to a lesser degree), in order to make sense of her world.

Yes, she most likely uses the words for colour to describe *something*, but colors are qualia, things that are impossible to describe without refering either to the things themselves (circular logic) or personal experience (which Lilly does not have), thus her concept of colours is something else than what the words usually mean.

The prospect of blind people being synesthetic interested me so i digged up a little. All references to synesthetic blinds were of late-blinds, that is to say, people who had possesssed sight at some point of their lives. It's a good philosophical thought exercise to try determine if it's possible for a NLP-blind since birth to have synesthesia.

But yeah, oekaki, no rules etc.

[cpl_crud]

Yeah I've read into synesthesia, and that's partially what I was thinking about, but not exactly.

Still, whilst this is totally speculation, I still think that you would link certain words to certain experiences. Since there is no word for "the sound that the cello makes as it reflects off the walls," she woudl use the words taht she already knows.... maybe.

I dunno. I jsut thought I'd waste a bit of work time to explore how Lilly seesm to konw everything that is going on, like Hanako's blushing and Hisao hiding behind the doors and the like.
It didn't turn out exactly as I imagined, but that's 'cuase it's hard to be blind and visualise things...

[Aura]

Since there is no word for "the sound that the cello makes as it reflects off the walls," she woudl use the words taht she already knows.... maybe.

Yeah this is what i think too. Rather than true synesthesia, she would use the words for visual sensations to describe things that she feels are important but have no sufficient expression (like the cello echoing off the walls of what have you), since she has no other use for words like blue. It could be a thing she invented when she was a kid, a sort of child's secret language.