The “Colour Hearing Questionnaire” survey in the second half of the 1920s was completed by employees of the Department of Theory and History of Music of the State Institute of Art History R. I. Gruber, S. A. Dianin and G. M. Rimsky-Korsakov with the participation of I. M. Andreevsky. The questionnaire was printed by the publishing house “Academy” in a circulation of 1000 copies. (!). It was supposed to be sent out to “Leningrad and provincial musical figures.” However, in the archives of R. I. Gruber, only two completed questionnaires were preserved: the first belonged to the owner of colour hearing B. V. Asafiev, who at that time headed OTIM GIII; the second, virtually empty, to the composer G.N. Popov, who stated that he had no synaesthesia (that is, as follows from the questionnaire, “the emergence of visual impressions from auditory ones and vice versa”) and photism (“the perception of sounds coloured in some colour”). How many questionnaires were collected and what the results of the study were remains unclear at this time. However, the questionnaire itself, compiled by OTIM employees, represents a valuable source for studying the phenomenon of coloured hearing.
Links to Third-Party Publications:
Kolganova O. Work plan of the Department of Theory and History of Music in the field of “light and sound” (State Institute of Art History, 1920s) // The Art of Sound and Light: Galeev Readings: Materials of the International Research and Practice Conference (Kazan, July 3–6, 2025) / “Bulat Galeev–Prometheus” Foundation; ed.-comp. A. B. Maksimova, ed. O. V. Kolganova. – Kazan: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, 2025. pp. 154–160; Kolganova O. V. Study of “coloured hearing” at the State Institute of Art History in the 1920s (based on materials from the collections of the Russian National Museum of Music) // Cultural heritage of Eurasia: problems of collecting, preservation, study and updating: Materials and abstracts of reports of the International Research and Practice Conference (St. Petersburg, October 13–15, 2025) / Russian Institute of Art History / Comp. and resp. ed. D. A. Bulatova, editor-compiler E. P. Yakovleva. St. Petersburg, 2025. pp. 92–94. https://artcentre.ru/publications/
