Editor's Weekly Ramblings 141

June 1st 2006

Seeing Music

What colour and shape is your favourite pop song? For some people with synaesthesia, it's a pretty straightforward question. Due to connections between different perceptual areas of their brain - like the part of the brain that perceives colour being linked with the area that detects a tone - synaesthetes tend to have two or more of their senses that are connected. With one type of synaesthesia, those affected will see colours and shapes when they listen to music, and may associate a specific colour with each letter and day of the week.

Credit: Jane Mackay Many synaesthetes are artists who paint what they see when they listen to music.

I first heard about this condition a few years ago and have been intrigued ever since. Last night, I took the opportunity to attend an event about synaesthesia at the Dana Centre in London. The event featured a painter called Lynette Kay who is a synaesthete as well as an animator called Samantha Ward who has been working with a researcher from University College London to visually represent the experience of people with synaesthesia.

Interestingly enough, the experiences of synaesthetes are all different. Ward showed the animations she had created based on what six synaesthetes visualised when they heard the same note - and repeated the experiment for 20 different notes. Playing back the animations she had created, it was evident that each person's visualisations had a unique style and one could almost predict which animation corresponded to which synaesthete for subsequent notes after having seen a few of them.

But there were also similarities between people's experiences. Typically, the visualisations emerged from left to right and were sharper for loud, sharp notes and fuzzier for quiet ones. All the images were abstract and tended to be moving blobs and smooth curves, although one person seemed to see two coloured lines that moved in various ways against a black background.

This lead to the question of whether everyone has some synaesthetic ability - and so during the break we were handed crayons and paper to try our hand at visualising what we heard as we listened to a violin and cello piece.