I have a couple of friends who hear music as colors. I am casually obsessed with this topic. I taught piano lessons to a kid who would say this is blue, green…etc.
I copied this out of Synethesia Wiki:
from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), “together,” and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), “sensation”—is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. [1][2][3][4] People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored.
I wonder if there is a correlation between the visible color spectrum and Synesthesia.
A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to 750 nm.[1] In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 790–400 terahertz.
Here is a hypothesis; Maybe people who have an acute sense of hearing are able to hear terahertz, which enables them to distinguish some sort of color from the sounds they hear.
I am very curious about this topic. How people experience sound. Please share on this post.
I will begin one:
I experience sound and songs with some color, but more as a 3 dimensional space with momentum and movement. I see things as a connected thought that is visually represented. This visual representation also seems to move at what is a bpm. This is my experience when listening/performing “experiemental music” or more traditional concepts of songs and song structure.
…Ok so your turn….
though i don’t have synesthesia, i definitely closely tie music making and listening to the process of visual art making. like you have the principles (repetition, harmony, dominance, etc) and elements (texture, color, shape, etc) of visual design that almost all correspond really well when thinking about audio design.
the ones that really jump out for me personally, relating the visual to the auditory, are space and texture. as far as space goes, i love thinking about how things are panned, left center and right, and how the arrangement of sounds creates this kind of fourth dimension that has a 360 degree span but doesn’t occupy physical space. that’s maybe poorly worded, but hopefully that makes sense. i think it’s such a brilliant creation that music makes. i also love the absence of space, the whole miles davis it’s the notes that you’re not playing that are most important kind of thing. this is really important to me when i’m trying to make beats, like how can i make a silence hit as hard if not harder than the kick drum? that’s what is so brilliant about that aaliyah song “are you that somebody,” that part in the beat where everything drops out. that just hits so hard.
and texture of course is so important with sound. the course texture of distortion and overdrive, the smoothness of a sine wave, etc. that’s why i’m so pumped out how sampling culture has just exploded, dropping so many different textures into mixes.
by the way, it was great getting to see you play at whartscape the other night! would have liked to have chatted a little more, but that night was pretty bonkers! looking forward to hearing more of your jams, and i thoroughly enjoy the synthephilic posts you make on here!
I went to the Spy Number exhibition in Palais de tokyo in Paris and there i found about this Lexicon project http://www.lecsonic.net/pges%20html/dico/pgemenu.html
i thought you might enjoy this: science and sound