Artists with Synesthesia taste colors, smell sounds, paint music

I had never heard of 'synesthesia' and just ran across two interesting examples this morning.  It makes me wonder how many artists might have this?  

Until the age of 15, McCracken thought that everyone lived in the same hue-rich, dynamic realm of color that she had known since birth. “Basically, my brain is cross-wired,” she explains regarding her synesthesia. “I experience the ‘wrong' sensation to certain stimuli. Each letter and number is colored and the days of the year circle around my body as if they had a set point in space. But the most wonderful ‘brain malfunction' of all is seeing the music I hear. It flows in a mixture of hues, textures, and movements, shifting as if it were a vital and intentional element of each song.”

Melissa McCracken Paints Music


radiohead-'lucky'

Lucy Engelman and  Daniel Mullen collaboration

American artist and filmmaker Lucy Engelman has a far different experience of the world than most. Engelman has a phenomenon called Synesthesia, which crosses her perceptual pathways to allow her to taste colors, smell sounds, and even experience verbal data as a spectrum of vibrant colors. Engelman’s husband, Scottish painter Daniel Mullen, decided to translate her complex sensory world in a way that might be easier to understand for those of us who don’t see days and numbers as pockets of color.

Those images look nice. Not sure about how I feel about the whole idea though of painting music etc, to each their own I guess.

Marcel Doscher wrote:Those images look nice. Not sure about how I feel about the whole idea though of painting music etc, to each their own I guess.

Hi Marcel...welcome to permies

The point is that those with this condition actually see colors when hearing music and other sense variations/crossovers.

I think synesthesia is a really cool phenomenon. I always thought numbers had personality--like 5 was an Elvis like person and 6 was a real jerk but 9 was really nice and mothering. I don't know if that's synesthia or not, but I do remember in high school art class, my teacher had us draw (with pastels) the music we were listening to. It was a really fun, relaxing activity.

Now I wish I had the freetime to do it again--if anyone does have nice, extra hours in their day, try drawing/painting your favorite music. Perhaps you'll find it freeing and fun and it'll get your creative juices. Maybe you'll even get a lovely piece of art work out of it, too! :D

Yes! Fantasia, of course....haven't watched that in a long long time... thanks burra!

Fantasia: A Composer s Experience of Synesthesia

synesthesia


Nicole I love the numbers thing...don't know if that's it but it might be?

I always thought numbers had personality--like 5 was an Elvis like person and 6 was a real jerk but 9 was really nice and mothering. I don't know if that's synesthia or not,

here's a little more.....I am fascinated and just a bit envious

12 famous artists with synesthesia

http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar01/synesthesia.aspx

Judith Browning wrote:

The point is that those with this condition actually see colors when hearing music and other sense variations/crossovers.

I have synesthesia (I have multiple versions, including one of the most common types 'grapheme-color', or seeing colors in letters and numbers).

My understanding is that there are at least two versions of synesthesia, one where people experience the secondary sense as outside themselves (external) and those who experience the secondary sense inside their heads (internal). I'm one of the latter and I feel it coming from the back of my head (occipital lobe).

Nicole Alderman wrote:I think synesthesia is a really cool phenomenon. I always thought numbers had personality--like 5 was an Elvis like person and 6 was a real jerk but 9 was really nice and mothering. I don't know if that's synesthia or not, but I do remember in high school art class, my teacher had us draw (with pastels) the music we were listening to. It was a really fun, relaxing activity.

Now I wish I had the freetime to do it again--if anyone does have nice, extra hours in their day, try drawing/painting your favorite music. Perhaps you'll find it freeing and fun and it'll get your creative juices. Maybe you'll even get a lovely piece of art work out of it, too! :D

That sounds like ordinal linguistic personification type of synesthesia to me. I met someone with that type who experience letters and numbers as having gender, and I think what you're describing sounds pretty similar.

From childhood, I've always pictured the days of the week as colors. Those blocks stretch out in the given pattern: Monday  yellow, Tuesday light green, Wednesday dark green...
But that's the only instance with me.

I experience this. When seeing random patterns in nature I “hear” faint classical music. I’m not musical at all. Once last month I experienced a wild violet tasting purple. Some examples of patterns which cause this shown. If I’ve had a bit of certain species mushrooms it is even more pronounced. 😆

My wife has synesthesia, the audio/visual kind. It affects her life a lot with pros and cons because sometimes a bright light can be excruciatingly loud or her vision gets blocked by watercolor-like colors from hearing a loud noise or from someone talking. She also has her own amazing ways of understanding math, music, linguistics. We have a friend who has the taste/touch kind, he doesn’t like slicing tomatoes because of the taste he experiences from the feel of them, so he wears gloves while slicing tomatoes.

Always interesting to learn more about synesthesia and find out about other people’s experiences of it. Looking forward to sharing the work of the artists mentioned here with my wife. Thanks for this thread!

We all had synesthesia as newborns, as I understand it. It takes something like a few months or even up to about a year for the senses to become un-jumbled from the time of birth in humans. (I can't remember exactly how long and I'm not looking it up now!) So at least it's something we basically all have experience with. My wife and I used to joke about that with all our kids when they were brand new: "aww, she probably loves the smell of that music" "I wonder if he finds the look of that wall scratchy" etc.

I've also heard of adults getting it with the aid of certain imbibations--true synesthesia, not just "this song reminds me of bright orange flashes on a dark background like in Fantasia, if I close my eyes and think about it"--and I suppose yeah it makes sense some might even get it "naturally" due to some quirk of their neurology. That's interesting.

The mild/false version (the kind I gave an example of above, between the em-dashes) does seem common among artists. If you're going to convey things through objects or images or sounds in a way that moves people in a deep way, it helps to be able to transpose more experience into those media than just what the senses what "normally" absorb back out at the end. My musician friends and I often talk about the "textures" and "colors" of music. Painters & photographers, and architects, talk about the "rhythm" of images and building facades, respectively. I don't think in most cases it's because of true synesthesia, but rather a kind of trained sensitivity/perceptivity. Still cool tho.

Oh yeah, it also reminds me of this:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/what-shapes-synesthesia-for-some-people-the-answer-is-fridge-magnets/

Using data from 6,588 people, the researchers worked out which colors were most commonly associated with which letters. They found that their results were consistent with previous experiments showing that English speakers often have possible spelling-based associations. For example, “G” is commonly green, while “Y” is commonly yellow—tendencies that can be found in the trends present in large collections of synesthetes.

These results were then compared to the colors of a specific fridge magnet set, a Fisher-Price set that was produced between 1971 and 1990.

Interesting article Ned!

So many things are a "continuum" - not just black and white or a yes/no switch - however the article's suggestion that some letter/colour linkings are secondary to children's experience is only a result.

This line:

And of course, there also are the cultural influences like the linguistic cues leading to a common association between “B” and “blue”.

Someone in the toy or poster development department may well have intentionally linked letters to 'logical' colours. After all, when I was deciding what colour zip-tie to use to mark my Gander named Betelgeuse, I decided Black would be great. Needless to say, Robin, got a Red zip-tie.

This is nothing like the beautiful artistry of Synesthesia - just useful word/colour association. If it works, I'll use it!

I've heard of the phenomenon but I'm not sure if having your brain cross wired like this is a plus or a minus. Those who have it seem to think of it as a plus, and perhaps it is, to them.
I do not see any application where it would be a plus, beside this wonderful artistry. It might be a useable talent if those who hear colors or taste sounds heard the same colors or tasted the same sounds. Then it would be a secret way to communicate among themselves, a bit like the Navajo "code talkers" of WWII.
If they had another disability [like deafness, for example and their code could be discovered, it might be a way to help them? [Like if seeing a certain color translated to a sound?]
It certainly is fascinating.
I think the closest that most of us can experience is that we do not perceive tastes in the same way: some find certain tastes pleasant while others really don't?