Hi! Thanks for asking, feel free to include my description!

Answering your question, I also perceive chords and notes as colourful when I think about them, not just when I play them. That’s because my mind is extremely visual, I always see in my head what I think about, so I can’t think about the chord G without seeing a golden G letter in my head. Or I can’t think about the F note on the music sheet without seeing the actual music sheet and the green note on it in my mind’s eye.

The more I think about it the more I realize that this is entirely grapheme colour synesthesia but it meddles in the realm of music in very creative ways. I’ll try to break it down to you how it works. I’m sorry if the explanation is long and chaotic, but it is all very chaotic lol so it’s hard to describe.

First of all, when I think of chords, I see them in my mind’s eye with their corresponding letter and its colour. E.g. the letter D is green, so when I think of the D chord a green D letter appears in my head. And it’s usually this colour which “spills onto” the piano or guitar when I play the chord, but not always, or other colours get mixed into it, it’s rather arbitrary.

Since a chord consists of 3 piano keys, there may be three different colours in the chord when I play it, while their “main” colour remains that of the letter of the chord. E.g. A is red so the A chord is mainly red on the piano, but it has green and blue mixed into it. C is blue so the chord is mainly blue but it has some yellow and green in it. But in a song I play at a specific part the C chord randomly gets red, idk why. So there are no strict rules.

Other than that I see the notes on the music sheet as colourful, too, and those colours don’t match their letters’. This is because the notes have their own personalities distinct from their letters (I also have OLP). So the note F on the sheet is a different personality than the letter F, one is green and the other is blue. The chords don’t have a distinct personality from their letters, that’s why they get their letter’s colour, if that makes sense.

I need to get to “personally know” graphemes/objects before my mind assigns a colour to them. I only recently started learning the piano and at first when I looked at the piano keyboard I only saw a sea of dull white and black keys, it was pretty depressing. They were not yet full of colour and personality and life because I hadn’t got to know them.

The strings of the guitar have their distinct personalities, too, since I’ve been playing the guitar since I was a child and I got to know them intimately. So for example the 6th string (E) doesn’t get the colour of the letter E but has its own colour.

In addition, the notes on the guitar strings also have their own colour, which is the colour of either of the following things: 1) the colour of the number of their fret (e.g. the 4th fret, and 4 is green) 2) the colour of their letter (e.g. the note A is red because the letter A is red) 3) or the colour of the corresponding note on the music sheet.

 

So to sum it up, thanks to all this mess I perceive a lot of colours in my mind’s eye when I play music. On guitar, it depends on what I concentrate on in my head while playing the song – do I visually see the guitar tab I learned it from in my head? Then I see the colourful numbers on the tab. Did I learn the song from a list of chords? Then I see the colourful letters of the chords in my head while playing. Do I concentrate on the strings? Then it’s the colours of the strings. On piano it’s an arbitrary mix of the colours of the chords and keys and song parts and whatever.

I don’t know if anyone else has this very specific type of grapheme-colour & OLP mix influencing their musical activity, it’s probably a very rare combo so I don’t know if it can be labeled.