[torpidor]

Color is overrated in a world where most are colorblind. Red means danger or stop because you have seen a lot of stop signs. In a world of colorblind people, stop sign colors are chosen by the colorblind, based on something like "is this a cheap metal" rather than design language (which no longer exists for color). Instead we would use reflectivity or something to indicate danger. As to whether or not the varying-colored stop signs leads to a statistically significant number of color-sighted people blowing through them it is hard to say, but does seem a legitimate safety concern.

And this is the situation in music; keys are chosen based on the technical details of the musician rather than a design language. Meanwhile, we do have a design language based on relative pitch (e.g. a 5/7 chord "leads" to the tonic). Of course you can see that the same way you can see a purple stop sign, but you may lack some of the pattern-matching intuition of your peers.

As a musician with relative pitch and the child of a musician with perfect pitch, I have watched them get puzzled a lot navigating a design language that is very obvious to me. Perhaps you are a better musician than they are, or perhaps you avoid areas where the design language dominates. Either way, I would not trade places with you, unless the rest of society did also.

[wwweston]

> Color is overrated in a world where most are colorblind.

That's speaking to the value in communication/collaboration.

The sensory experience itself would still have its own qualities even if other people are unable to appreciate them.

I went through a weird period of a few months in college when tones had a... character. I use that term rather than color because for some reason some of them were tied in with associations I had with the sound of people's voices. Not every pitch had this association, but recognizing the character let me identify the pitch.

The utility of this was certainly nothing astounding, but it was interesting to say the least. And it probably wasn't even absolute pitch.

And then, of course, there's the matter of utility that doesn't come from communication. Color vision doesn't just provide a field of aesthetic exploration, it actually lets people distinguish certain things more easily.