Are you a synaesthete without knowing it?

[Peter C]

Do you see colours or forms when listening to music, for example?
Synesthesia - Wikipedia

Edit - just googled this term on this site and it has been cited more than once over the years. I must have missed it. Interesting, nonetheless.

[AllanAllen]

I am not. I think it might help if major sounded sky blue and minor sounded gray, but I don't hear that way.

[Peter C]

I read the article in more detail and laughed a bit, finding a few of these characteristics very relatable.

Projective synesthesia: seeing colors, forms, or shapes when stimulated (hearing certain music)
-I don't see colours, rather forms like giant waves

Auditory–tactile synesthesia: hearing a specific word or sound feels like touch in one specific part of the body or may experience that certain sounds can create a sensation in the skin without being touched.
-Happens all the time

Lexical–gustatory synesthesia - For example, the word basketball might taste like waffles.
-Ha!

Mirror-touch synesthesia - a form of synesthesia where individuals feel the same/similar sensation as another person (such as touch). For instance, when such a synesthete observes someone being tapped on their shoulder, the synesthete involuntarily feels a tap on their own shoulder as well. People with this type of synesthesia have been shown to have higher empathy levels compared to the general population. This may be related to the so-called mirror neurons present in the motor areas of the brain, which have also been linked to empathy.
-Absolute torture at times!

Misophonia is a neurological disorder in which negative experiences (anger, fright, hatred, disgust) are triggered by specific sounds.
-Yes, and what a bummer. Has improved over the years though.

Some synesthetes often report that they were unaware their experiences were unusual until they realized other people did not have them....in rare cases, synesthetes report that their experiences can lead to a degree of sensory overload


There is research to suggest that the likelihood of having synesthesia is greater in people with autism spectrum condition.
-I resemble that remark!



How about you?

[Stringswinger]

This artist has a section of her website devoted to this:

Natalia Aandewiel Fine Art

Check out her artworks section

[AllanAllen]

How about you?

You know, the hooks you use on a peg board make it feel like my eyes are being stabbed out.

Maybe I got a little synesthesia after all, of course… it’s an uncomfortable one.

[supersoul]

My perception get intermingled, but I don't know if it rises to the definition of synesthesia.I always have mental images while listening. But that makes sense to me, our brains are all crosswired inside and aren't made up of discrete systems. Everything spills over, and that's part of what makes us unique.

I think of true synaesthia is like tasting an orange while hearing a D major chord, and I don't do that.

Alexander Scriabin was exploring synesthesia a hundred years ago. He invented a color organ that attached colors to notes, arranged in a circle of fifths. Prometheus has a part for this color organ.
Alexander Scriabin, 1872 – 1915 – Musical Colour Wheel | Jim the Obscure
Sound and vision: Scriabin’s Theosophical score for orchestra and ‘color organ’

There's also a cool book, by Diane Ackermann, called "A Natural History of the Senses" that has a big part on Synesthesia.

[sgosnell]

Not synesthesia, but I once discovered that I was a poet and didn't know it.

[pauln]

I won't even attempt to explain, but I probably have a bit of it.

Progressions give me a sense of passage through a space of changing views (of clouds and horizon) and paths similar to what an aerobatic or dog fighting biplane airman would see and fly.

Chord harmonies feel spatial geometric, subject to complex changes in orientation, rotation, and conformation (like protein folding) to comprise inversions, extensions, alterations. If you have played with Lissajous figures generated by music, they are kind of like that.

Soloing lines are the most vivid, like toothpaste squeezed from the tube showing the physical analogous shape of the ASDR profile (attach, sustain, decay, release).

[Peter C]

Interesting replies.

I gather that Eddie Valen Halen's "brown sound" was originally a reference to his brother's snare drum sound - like he was beating on a log, or something to that effect. So "organic/earthy" or whatever. However, to my ear, it was more like a turbocharged car engine about to blow up. So, fire, which would suggest red?

I can "see" that colours like white, pink, orange are bright, so high frequency, but brown and black are surely for the lower end of the spectrum. No? Anyway, as stated, I'm not really chromaesthetically inclined.

[Doctor Jeff]

I have trouble relating to this concept.

I do think I attach certain non-auditory qualities to sound, but they’re not nearly so well defined.

I will say that when playing guitar, I “see” the fretboard in 3 dimensions in my mind. I feel that I am translating an architectural construction into sound.

Villa-Lobos IMO is one of the masters of that kind of approach—“architectural” composition. He is said to be the most guitaristic of the major composers.

[MarkRhodes]

I learned about synesthesia from reading Nabokov's "Speak, Memory."
He had it.
I do not.
Not even close.
Wonder what it might be like.

[pauln]

Interesting replies.

I gather that Eddie Valen Halen's "brown sound" was originally a reference to his brother's snare drum sound - like he was beating on a log, or something to that effect. So "organic/earthy" or whatever. However, to my ear, it was more like a turbocharged car engine about to blow up. So, fire, which would suggest red?

I can "see" that colours like white, pink, orange are bright, so high frequency, but brown and black are surely for the lower end of the spectrum. No? Anyway, as stated, I'm not really chromaesthetically inclined.

I think the brown sound was achieved by B+ voltage starvation from the tube amp power supply caused by deliberate lowering of the voltage provided to the amp, thought of not as a sound color but derived from the phrase "brown out" describing when the electric power utility is failing to maintain nominal spec voltage during periods of near threshold max load...

[Greywolf]

I'm HF ASD and have always seen/felt music in a way that is hard to describe . It helps as a soundman

[Jonah]

I associated keys with colours since I was a kid…

like D major blue and gold, B minor more like brown , E major deep dark green… etc

it is quite flexible and in real music chages and mixes

[Jabberwocky]

Hearing Diana Krall makes me throw up. Does that count? Am I a synthespian? Synæsthete? Synæstit?

[Peter C]

I think the brown sound was achieved by B+ voltage starvation from the tube amp power supply caused by deliberate lowering of the voltage provided to the amp, thought of not as a sound color but derived from the phrase "brown out" describing when the electric power utility is failing to maintain nominal spec voltage during periods of near threshold max load...

Sounds right to me. I was just getting a visual of an amp valve turning from a red to a brownish glow due to lack of voltage, even if it doesn't work that way.

[Litterick]

Some time ago, I participated in an experiment run by the University of Auckland and Yale University, which measured tone-deafness among two million subjects worldwide. Today, the organisers sent me this message:

We appreciate your continued interest in contributing to citizen-science research and would like to invite you to a new experiment, following up on the Tone-Deafness Test that you already completed. In this follow-up experiment, we will first ask you to play the Tone-Deafness test again, then we will ask you to play a short game where you judge how well colors and sounds fit together in context.

Synaesthesia is quite beyond me: I make no association between colours and anything else. But it is nice to see it being studied. I will participate.