Slashdot Mirror
Seeing Sounds and Hearing Colors
somberlain writes "BBC has an interesting article about people who hear colours and see sounds. Luckily I don't have this medical condition: but which sounds do you want to colorize?" This is an old story, but just reading the woman's descriptions of her condition make it worth linking.
And also from ketamine. Apparently.
All things in moderation; including moderation
Just wondering what those with synaesthesia think of colorized movies. Or for that matter, what they think of dubbed foreign language films.
Do the picture/sound clash more or less on "tampered" movies more or less than on the original?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'm wondering if each person has a unique color "signature"
If so, could a scanner be developed that sees these signatures and identify people from a distance?
Gone will be the days of thumbprints and retina scans. Now you can be identified without even being aware of it.
Signus X-1
I have this condition, but in what I guess is a more mild form. I don't associate sounds with colors-- UNTIL NOW!-- but I do associate words and letters with colors and... um... tastes, kind of.
I guess it started in the first grade or so, when I was learning to read. The letter "A" (capital A, that is) has always been sort of a bright red color, and smelled and tasted sweet, like cherry-flavored candy. "B" is purpley-blue, and chewy. "C" is lemony yellow. And so on. When I visualize any of those letters in my head, the color and the texture, or taste, or smell come along with them. It's hard to explain, I guess, if you don't know what I'm talking about.
When I was growing up, I just assumed everybody was like this. I turn 30 next month, and it was only earlier this year that I learned that I was different from most people. I was talking about our new house with my girlfriend, and I said something like, "Let's paint that room blue... sort of an 'M' blue." She had no f*cking idea what I was talking about, and that's how I learned that I was unusual in this way.
Since then I've kinda been reading up on synaesthesia a little bit in my spare time. Funny coincidence that this should come up on Slashdot at about the same time.
I write in my journal
I'm just wondering... If by looking at something they heard sounds and by hearing sounds they see things...Can they experience a feeback loop?
If they get into a feedback loop, how does it sound/look like?
--Vuzz
Probably the composers. A friend of mine wrote a piano piece about blue and it really did feel like blue to me (I play several musical instruments).
People have colors to me, but how is that to be distinguished from what many people call auras? And the color impressions are the same there as well: individual and meaning the most to the person who actually see them.
Lots of visuals have sound (as opposed to sound having color.. but I hear that too as mentioned earlier) but how is that distinguished from other things we associate with an object? Could be just projection.
I think that musicians are just more in tune with associations as opposed to having a different wiring.
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
and magic mushrooms (psilocybin) and probably many others I havent tried (peyote, ayawasca etc). I usually experience something similar on higher doses, all senses become one and they make "sense" under that state of mind, its not just a mixup/confusion of senses.
That depends on the music. For me, Classic ususally is blue in various shapes, depending on the composer. Mozart, for example is a lighter blue than, say, Wagner. Pop generally is purple (maybe because I don't like either) and Rock is black.
Luria documents a man with apparently a photographic memory, who seems never to forget things. The man apparently had synesthesia, and Luria hypothesized that the additional sensory cues helped the mnemnist identify memories.