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Do you 'see' sounds and 'hear' colours?

  
  

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Olulabelle
21:59 / 05.04.03
Rage, it's not perception. If someone Synaesthetic broke up with you because your name 'tasted wrong' it would be because to them it actually *did*.

None of us (Synaesthetes) choose the colours we hear; if we did I can say emphatically my ambulance/fire engine colours would be different because the ones I have seriously hurt my eyes. My friends are all aware of my condition and now when there is a emergency vehicle going past they stop talking to me, and stand still until it's gone so that I don't feel pressured to keep trying to go on with life. It's exactly the same with going out. If I'm invited to go out they tell me what kind of music it is and we try and assess how I'll react. I have a friend who is in a band and I'd really like to go see them play, I've heard their music in recordings but until I actually go I won't know how much it will affect me.

I can't feel smells and I can't smell words but I can sort of taste feelings; when people are angry with me I have the taste of Corriander in my mouth. I know it sounds weird but it's so strong it's the main reason I don't like Corriander. It makes me feel like I have done something wrong.

And the reason we're all still posting here is because you can't learn it (see previous reasons for why in the thread). As I say, anything that makes you have an abnormal response to something sensually can be consituted as Synaesthesia, but I'm not sure a visual image of a song counts. For more clarification on this see the main criteria for Synaesthetic responses'which I posted earlier in the thead.

It's very interesting that you should bring up specific bands. Since I started this thread I have been experimenting to see which pieces of music invoke responses in me, using my friends (bless them )as 'control' strains of the test. We have all been listening to the same song on the same nights, but in our individual houses, and it appears that the songs they say provoke the most visual images for them also give me the biggest Synaesthetic response, i.e. wonderful colours and shapes. Whether this is related can be debated, but it's certainly interesting. And yes I do listen to Radiohead, and some of their songs are visually outstanding. A few other examples of bands which I get responses to no matter what album track I play are:

Primal Scream
Vertical Horizon
The Avalanches
Custom Blue
Feeder
Coldplay
Portishead
The Alpinestars
Dead can Dance
Massive Attack

And then, conversely,

Elbow
Manic Street Preachers
Powderfinger
Haven
The Leaves
Feeder
Jeff Buckley
Lowgold
Norah Jones

have absolutely no Synaesthetic effect on me whatsoever, even though I really like them.

It could be that the tone of the singer's voice is what gives me visual responses, but if that were the case then how do we explain the fact that when I listen to one of the tracks off the American Beauty soundtrack (Thomas Newman, Dead Already, which is instrumental) I get loads yet when I listen to the Gladiator music which I also really like (embarrassed, but have to use it as it's a good example) I see nothing?

So. My experiment doesn't seem to have a scientifically proven result it seems.

Yet.
 
 
*
15:27 / 06.04.03
If Portishead gives you good visuals you might try Splashdown. I would be interested to know how you find them. Are the visuals volume-dependent? For instance, if something played loudly hurts your eyes, does the same sound played at half-volume have a more tolerable effect?
 
 
Quantum
14:37 / 07.04.03
The colours you see (Olulabelle and Anna) are they coloured blotches like an afterimage, a flash of colour across your visual field, consistent shapes of colour, what?
I imagine it to be like the black spots you get in front of your eyes when you stand up too quick or get a migraine- or like the visuals you get from hallucinogens, something in your eye not the world.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
02:29 / 08.04.03
Ummm, it's difficult to explain so I'll describe some specific reactions. When I hear Figaro, whatever the volume may be, I get moving bursts of off-white and gold. I can see through them but they're definitely there and rather distracting. They move a little and grow and are kind of circular but rippled round the edges and their size depends on where the piece of music is. The outlines of these... bubbles (for want of a better word) are sometimes blue but that tends to depend on the light in a room or maybe how tired I am.

When the computer room alarm goes off, it's a high pitched bleeping sound, I get waves of gold rectangles, not specific shapes but blurred in to each other. It happens to the extent where I can only just see and they're coupled with a sense of panic. It feels like my brain locks down completely because I can hear the sound, see the gold and I just need to get away.

When I pass a drill on the street I'm overwhelmed by red. Not scarlet but a kind of brown-red like the colour you see when you look at the sun with your eyes shut. Actually that's exactly what it's like but it's entirely dependent on where the drill is in proximity to me. If I cross the road I can see but if I walk right next to it's like my eyes are shut.

Those are probably the only three major reactions I have and Figaro's quite fun (particularly when you're sitting down and watching Home Front) but I hate the other two. When I was younger I assumed that somehow my emotional reaction and the synaesthesia were linked. I would often feel panic/calm when confronted with the noises that provoked a colour-sound response but I rejected that on the grounds that a lot of music that I link with emotion doesn't make me see things!
 
 
elthe deuro
16:53 / 08.04.03
According to the aforementioned posted criteria, I don't have this condition... but I do have very strong number/letter color association. I first realized it in algebra class in the 7th grade -- listening to a big burly boy call out a pair of Cartesian coordinates (1,3) that had feminine color associations for me (white,pink) and giggling... then realizing that it was funny because the numbers had colors.

In high school, I carried around index cards that had my friends' phone numbers encoded in bands of color.

I also used to have color associations for the notes on a musical scale, which is why I think I was able to memorize piano pieces so easily. (Some of them were fairly obvious correlations -- B = blue, G = green, a sharp = funny plaid color.) So my visualizations are purely internal, but a funny mix between the intuitive color associations and the too-literal workings of logic (for instance, when I listen to classic music, I get pretty abstracts, but also sharp pictures of the instruments playing... so if a violin plays, I see a violin. Very distracting. Parents took me to too many symphonies as a child.)
 
 
Quantum
12:56 / 09.04.03
Thanks Anna. Elthe- associating numbers with colours is quite common, people seem to spontaneously do it, dunno why... maybe it's to make them easier to remember, maybe it's just the colour the numbers were printed on your nursery wall, who knows.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:29 / 09.04.03
Number- colour association is fine until you try and do something ridiculous like make percentages in to fractions. Suddenly nothing makes sense, the colours don't match up and you don't understand how they equate at all. That would be why my maths IQ results are stupidly low. It's fine if you're dealing with an object. While counting money the association can be ignored because you have a coin in your hand but working purely with numbers borders on hopeless if you really do have a fundamental knowledge of 2 being red. On the other hand it can result in utter brilliance if you manage to work out a system- unfortunately I never have.
 
 
raf
15:45 / 10.04.03
When I first heard of Synaesthesia a couple of years ago it really blew me away, because I had always just assumed that everyone saw numbers words and music as colours! I suppose I had spoken about it a couple of times to people close to me who responded with a blank look of... wtf are you on about now raf? I really never paid much attention and then when I did hear about it as a 'condition' I had a laugh for weeks going around asking everyone "What colour is Wednesday?" and the like.

I guess that I might be a very mild Synaesthete: all letters, most words and more specifically every word that belongs in a list and most sounds have their own colour. It's most pronounced with things like the days of the week where if I'm thinking of a sentence or a concept involving a day I may by pass the actual word completely and only visualise the colour in my mind.
As regard numbers, oulabelle has mentioned that it hinders her, I think find it helpful certainly not a hindrance but if I have it at all it's very mild compared to what she describes. I notice that when I learn new programming languages that the syntax quickly takes on a mapping to colours but in a quite vague way, so that while I can feel the association when I try to focus on the colour it starts to fade away, or rather its name fades away, it gets incredibly vague and almost impossible to explain. One reason that I'm interested is that I can pick up any programming language to a level where I can work well with it in a couple of days but my many efforts to learn French or German have ended in abject failure. I don't think I have any associations with French words, perhaps there is a link.
Maybe though if I just went and spent some months in France and got immersed in the language then I'd get a whole new set of colours to play with!
Another thing I notice is that the visualisations are strongest with things I learned early in life (short words, alphabet, time, proper names etc.) and to music I listened to from early on.

The associations in music are very ephemeral, I don’t see colours with changes in notes or tempo but when I close my eyes I can see a colour that seems related to the sound but usually married to the artist. So say Bach Handel and Mozart can all sound different shades of yellow brown and red But Tom Waits is Green and Johnny Cash is blue no matter what they are doing (I really wonder if this hasn't got more to do with album colours than sounds for me ;-) Van Morrison hits every colour in the spectrum! I could go on forever...

Anyway I didn't intend to make a long rambling post about the things that go on inside my head, I really just wanted to post a link to the first of this years Reith lectures where Ramachandran talks about this and in particularly mentions tests that sound interesting.
(Hey did I just learn to post links at the first attempt, prob not we'll see :-)
 
 
Olulabelle
20:07 / 13.04.03
Thanks for the link to the lectures Raf.

The colours you see (Olulabelle and Anna) are they coloured blotches like an afterimage, a flash of colour across your visual field, consistent shapes of colour, what?

In terms of what I 'see,' the colours form shapes or patterns dependant on the sound I hear, for example I totally agree with Annas description of overwhelming red, and it being like having your eyes shut. I have a friend who, when he laughs makes me see yellowy/orange bubbles, sort of growing and popping. They're in front of my eyes, but not 'on' the things I look at, I mean, if I happened to be looking at a ball when he laughed they wouldn't bend 'around' the ball. It's like they're projected from my eyes into the mid-space in between my eyes themselves and the things I am viewing. They're a bit like the black spots you get, but stronger, and more obvious - you can't see through them.
 
 
Quantum
06:40 / 17.04.03
sounds lovely! (obvious drawbacks aside) and almost exactly like very strong acid visuals- without the giggling and drooling.
 
 
Hieronymus
23:11 / 25.11.03
Found this article today, which mentions Peter Grossenbacher's work, one of the faculty members at the school I'm at.

Fascinating stuff.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
08:49 / 26.11.03
coloured-hearing Synaesthetes have individual responses to particular sounds, but there are many we share.

Does anyone know if there's any consistency in how numbers are perceived? I was just reading Dracula Mass's article, which refered to someone who saw seven as green -and I've never known anyone who assigned (if that's the right word for something you don't choose) colours to numbers and didn't put these two together.
 
 
grant
13:20 / 26.10.04
Nature publishes report on synaesthesia and auras.

The last couple paragraphs are interesting:

He is intrigued by the idea that synaesthesia could explain auras, but doesn't see a way to prove it. "We don't have any way of knowing," he says. "But certainly synaesthetes are perceiving things that others aren't. It's an interesting supposition."

Ward, like many, is a bit jealous of those with synaesthesia, but the condition seems to be present from birth and impossible to learn. "The literature of aura reading - such as it is - claims that you can train yourself to read auras," says Ward. "This I do not believe. Synaesthesia is hardwired and biological."
 
 
MissLenore
21:02 / 02.12.04
I didn't want to start a different topic on this because it's sort of similar, but a friend of mine always experiences emotions as colours. From what I read on synaesthesia, experiencing emotion as a colour/sound etc. is not mentioned, so I would assume it is not the same thing.
Is there a particular condition for experiencing emotions as colours? It's really rather fascinating. I asked her the other day, while discussing her relationship troubles, how a certain man made her feel and her response was "Purple." I don't think it's just some weird thing she does for attention, so I figured I'd ask you lovely barbelites if you have any information on this sort of thing.
 
 
Simulacra
16:33 / 08.12.04
Thank you all for a very interesting conversation to read. I am one of those people who "see sounds" and this effect I cannot turn off. As mentioned before, one can get sensitive to certain audial environments but on the other hand fascinated by others.

If I were to describe it, I'd say that I experience this as an overlay to my vision. I realise that the moving shapes I see are not in my field of vision, but rather an overlay. It's possible to ignore these visual cues, but not to remove them. I guess it's been like this all my life and it has certainly influenced my taste in music.

I didn't really listen to music when I was a kid, since I didn't quite understand what people liked about music. It made no sense to me. I do however, remember an occasion when I was at a kiosk to buy a hot dog and there was this song which made sense because I saw it. I had seen sounds all along, but never found any music that had a pleasing and comprehensive visual structure before. I was seven years old and shit scared but managed to get the attendant to give me a tape with the music.

Now I use this to my advantage and listen to music very frequently. I have for example been experimenting with applying special soundtracks to fit with rooms. I also produce music for art projects that I work with. (For example http://interactingarts.org/thezone/)

One thing that makes me sad is when I think about that my experiences from non-evocative music are what non-synesthetians experience when listening to music (or hearing sound). To me, it seems very dull and that makes me sad. I wish I could "teach" someone how to do it.

And for you synesthetians: try listening to the Future Sound of London. That music gives me very good results - so good that I could lean back and just watch the show.
 
 
grant
13:55 / 18.04.05
Did anyone else catch the report on NPR's Morning Edition today?

They had a great feature on synaesthesia, including a long interview with Laura Rosser, a professional pianist who couldn't have yellow sheets in her periwinkle bedroom because they made a tritone -- a dissonant musical interval. Colors guide her playing, too.

One of the interesting things that they imply in the discussion is that synaesthesia can be... not exactly learned, but consciously refined, which Rosser did while learning a Rachmaninoff piece.

She also has trouble finding a note for orange. Go figure.

Anyway, the link takes you to a great page with a few other fun web resources on synaesthesia.
 
 
grant
14:01 / 18.04.05
I should also mention this is part of NPR's Where Science Meets Art series, which would go well with this old Science Art thread, now sadly riddled with broken links.

Although the art that's still there is breathtaking (at least for me).

The radio pieces, as you might expect, are a little audio-heavy, but there's some good visual arts & sculpture stuff.
 
 
astrojax69
04:48 / 03.05.05
She also has trouble finding a note for orange.

maybe it is because 'orange' is one of those few words in english with no genuine rhyme..? (like 'silver') as a musician, the sound of the word for the concept may play a part, mebbe? who knows.

i rekkun synesthesia is some sort of inadvertant access to the nonconscious processes in the brain - a 'leak' from one sense faculty into another. but that is another thread, mebbe... (watch that space)
 
 
Olulabelle
09:09 / 04.05.05
Astrojax, you reckon right. The theory is that Synaesthesia is the process of accessing unconscious parts of the brain, the bit that separates one sense from another. I think I already said this backthread, but some people believe that we are all born with Synaesthesia and then as babies most people learn to tune the sense to the correct physical component - smell to nose, sound to ear and so on.

Synaesthetes don't learn that 'correctly' or are slightly out of tune, so our ears 'see' and our noses 'hear'.

This would also account then, for some people being able to consiously refine it, as Grant said. If it's an ability we once all had, presumably there should be a way of re-accessing those patterns, even if we don't fully understand how to do that at the moment. That's why the whole 'tripping' thing is interesting; people who don't officially have Synaesthesia often report Synaesthetic responses when they are take hallucinogenic drugs. Perhaps this is a way of re-wiring the brain temporarily?

One thing I've noticed is that as I get older, very big sounds produce very strong reactions in me, for instance, loud, bangy fireworks produce violet flashes when they explode. This didn't used to be so; maybe that's because nowadays the sound is louder due to modern firework development.

I wonder what would happen if someone took hallucinogenic drugs and experienced a strong Synaesthetic reaction to a sound for instance, and then heard the sound without the drug? If it happened enough do you think eventually your brain might create that neural pathway permanently?
 
 
Spaniel
13:53 / 04.05.05
I vividly remember having a synaesthesic reaction to the name "Kate", as a very young child.

The word would conjure an image of something gold and spikey - resembling a crown - against a red background. The experience was pretty intense.
 
 
dj kali_ma
22:20 / 04.05.05
I have this idea... I hesitate to call it a "theory", since theories are hard to test outside of lab settings... that there are levels of synaesthesia, just as there are levels of autism.

There can be "high functioning autism", which manifests predominantly in people who program for a living. Likewise, there could be a concurrent "high functioning synaesthesia", where the senses mix, but not enough to distract from, say, driving. Or reading.
 
 
Smoothly
00:25 / 05.05.05
I think that's become a pretty respectable theory, dj kali ma. I recently caught Horizon's programme about synaesthesia on UK Nova (it's still there if you're interested, or a transcript can be found here).
Testing the general population for number-colour synaesthesia suggest that about 1 in 100 people exhibit this strongly, and that there's a strong genetic link. But it also looks at evidence of a mild synaesthetic sense in all of us. Professor Ramachandran talks about the central role a synaesthetic sensibility plays in metaphor - observing how many of them demand an intuitive corollary between distinct senses (a 'loud' shirt, a 'sharp' taste or a 'bitter' wind). I'd never really considered that before, and kinda assumed that these were idioms we just learned. I'm nothing like linguist enough to have much of an idea, but would I be right to expect that metaphors in different languages share some of these associations?

There was also some stuff in the programme about 'number lines' which is another phenomenon often found accompanying synaesthesia - rows of numbers (in some cases days, months, any or all everyday abstract sequences) projected in front you, like a Heads Up Display. Again, I wonder if we all have a very dim image of this. For example, if I'm counting days - say you asked me what day of the week April 28 was - I've noticed that I'll often use my finger to kinda headcount the days backwards in front of me. I also think of Peter Kay's routine about people speaking with their hands ("Not next week, the week after" with that bouncing hand gesture).
Dunno, but it seems quite possible to me that synaesthesia is something we all share, some with a great deal more acuity than others.
 
 
grant
18:25 / 03.06.05
MRI scans reveal the colors are real.

In one such experiment, they presented six synesthetes with patterns of black letters or numbers--known as "graphemes"--on a white background. They chose those graphemes that the synesthetes reported elicited specific colors. They designed the experiment so that if the synesthetes really were seeing the colors, that color perception would help them distinguish shapes such as triangles or squares formed by the graphemes.

...In fMRI scans, the researchers found that the synesthetes showed greater activation in a color-perception region of the cortex when viewing graphemes, compared to normal control subjects. The researchers found that the strength of this activation influences the strength of the synesthetic colors.
 
 
Cowboy Scientist
05:30 / 05.06.05
I have two of the weirdest forms of Synaesthesia:
Color-Taste and Sound-Touch.

In color-taste, I perceive red as sweet, yellow as spicy, blue as sour. I also get a really ugly taste from a particular tone of redish dark brown. Like chewing a rubber band.

In Sound-Touch, I feel a high-pitched sound as a pressure in my body with a hot sensation -wich can be annoying, and a low-pitched sound as a fresh, almost cold sensation.

I also have the sensibility to air movement and pressure Little Big Bang described previusly in this thread. for instance, if all the inner doors of my house are open, I can know if someone is moving even if they are being completely quiet.
 
 
grant
13:47 / 08.08.08
There's an interesting new test for synesthesia based on a "noisy" screensaver.

It doesn't actually generate sound, but some synesthetes can hear it.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:31 / 21.09.11
TimemachineGO!
 
 
astrojax69
19:14 / 03.12.11
you say that so orangely, mc...
 
 
Proinsias
19:37 / 12.12.11
I don't see sounds and hear colours
 
  

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