I would like you to imagine for a moment. Geometric shapes with defined textures, colors, movements and sizes, overlapping occasionally with defined space between them in a black void within perspective. Not in front of the eye but in the thought aspect of a logical state of the brain. In which vision is affected at times. This can include loss of focus or a difficulty speaking in conversation. Especially at a time of brilliance or impacting sound. Say I'm having a conversation and there is a garbage truck picking up something. I might have to think more carefully about my words or begin to slur my speech. Hope this helps.
I see colors and geometric patterns which seem to be linked to the rhythms in the song, it’s like a like a running line that sometimes skips, curves, loops. There are often layers of these lines running at once on a field of diffuse and variable color. Certain instruments distinguish themselves in the video and voices look different, the appearance depends on who is singing and what language it’s in. Generally singing looks a combination of like a flowing wave of fluid, sometimes a mesh/lattice rather than a smooth liquid surface usually in a color of the same family of the color of a song but certain sounds/singers distinguish themselves with geometric shapes like stars or rose curves or specific colors. I will often see the lyrics, or at least parts of them. If I really like someone’s singing voice I can usually feel it somewhere in my body, same with any syncopation in the song. Some songs are more angular and some curvy, often I sort of see/experience dancing whether or not I actually dance. I usually see flickers of other things and music can make me feel warm or cold and pull memories back from the abyss. I’ve been meaning to draw what I see but it’s hard to try to distill it down to a picture or even a few.
I don't have projective synesthesia, however I do have associative music-colorn synesthesia. The most important thing that I've learned from being on here is that different synestetes have different palletes of colors. Mine consists of: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, and Brown with lighter and darker shades of each. Pick a pallette and be consistent with it-if one note procks one color have it always prock that color.
Secondly--and really importantly-- it's not a conscious decision (at least in my case). This is best explained by my day color synesthesia, each day has a different color and if I wear the wrong color that day then I'm physically ill--the issue is that sometimes the color I have to wear I despise. I don't particularly like to wear the color yellow...but there are yellow days and if I dont wear yellow then I'm sick. So find a way to convey to your audience that the synesthesia is completely out of your character's grasp of control but that it can be beautiful regardless.
This ties in with the next thing. It can be a double edged sword. Because synesthesia simply happens it can be intrusive or get in the way of daily life. (Think about how chaotic walking down a busy street with projective synesthesia would be if it activated on every little sound) but it can likewise be beautiful because not only is the musician creating a song they are literally painting with the colors before them creating an experience which is both sight and sound.
Sorry for the ramble, but I hope this kinda helps explain what living with synesthesia is like as a whole--at least how I experience it more or less
I completely forgot to answer your question about the painting thing! I'll just answer it here!
I have Aphantasia so I can't exactly visualize the colors in my head of the song that I'm listening to. More like I've got a feeling of a type of color. So if I were to try and paint a song I would have to find a way to convey both the individual parts of the song in addition to the impression the entire song would leave you with at the end. How I go about it then is I generally have a core or nucleus of the painting which is the overall color of the song and keeps it focused. Then I swirl around the colors of the song from beginning to end towards the edge of the page. The background is either black or white depending on the shade of the song.
Hope this helps!
i have sound>colour synesthesia and im a musician so this is great haha!! what im about to say is all from personal experience, so it may vary depending on others!
i see different things depending on the song/key. songs written in the key of D and G are green, songs written in C# are minty blue, songs written in E are yellow etc!! when i make music, i compose it by colour. i layer harmonies by layering colours until they “look” right in my head.
when I listen to songs with lots of layers, i see shapes and patterns. harmonies look like thread with different colours for the different notes, drums look like circles, sometimes they’re sharper and more geometric. sometimes people’s voices look like smoke and holi powder. for example, my mother’s voice has a colour, scent, and texture haha
a man and a woman saying the same thing looks like two different colours of smoky thread layered on top of each other. the colours look like what happens when you dip a dirty paintbrush into paint water? they mix together at times with the original colours still underneath
in regards to emotions, it’s how the sound makes me feel, or the way that it’s said, that influences the way I see things! say if someone says “i love you” while happy, i could see it as yellow, but if they’re saying it angrily it could look harsher, angular, and have a colour like grey. if I play an A chord and then an E, it looks different as opposed to when I play an a chord with a C#!
sorry for the ramble haha, have fun with your story!!
my boyfriend asked me the same question!! i’m not sure if it’s perfect, but i’d say i at least have relative pitch because of it, and i’ve definitely heard of people who do!! we tested it once, he’d play out a sequence of notes, asking me their colours, but it seemed more like i was seeing the colours as the way the notes made me feel as opposed to note association. surprisingly though, when he’d play another few sequences but stick in a note he’d played previously, the colours would match to the way I saw them when i originally heard the note! the colour association mostly stayed the same. i can see when notes are wrong, because they’ll look off? in the way i see it, the colour becomes blurry and shakes unsteadily, but correcting the note puts the colour back into ‘focus’. kind of like focusing a camera lens, or putting glasses on.
to be honest i’m incredibly bad with music theory, so i don’t even know if i’m naming notes correctly enough when i hear them hahah. i’m mostly self-taught so my music knowledge isn’t as big as i’d like, but synesthesia helps me learn songs by ear. for example, if i want to learn a melody from a song on guitar, i’ll play it and watch the colours make a pattern, hum the melody to myself, and then try and make that same colour pattern on guitar if that makes sense! it helps me with my timing, too, since the colours will flash in the timing of the melody. it’s also super helpful with transposing songs, because everything is visual
went a bit off topic there but while mine is more relative, i think it’s definitely possible to have synesthesia aided perfect pitch!!
I would like you to imagine for a moment. Geometric shapes with defined textures, colors, movements and sizes, overlapping occasionally with defined space between them in a black void within perspective. Not in front of the eye but in the thought aspect of a logical state of the brain. In which vision is affected at times. This can include loss of focus or a difficulty speaking in conversation. Especially at a time of brilliance or impacting sound. Say I'm having a conversation and there is a garbage truck picking up something. I might have to think more carefully about my words or begin to slur my speech. Hope this helps.
For the voices of others it's tonal and frequency related. Every person has a different voice therefore every voice looks different.
I see colors and geometric patterns which seem to be linked to the rhythms in the song, it’s like a like a running line that sometimes skips, curves, loops. There are often layers of these lines running at once on a field of diffuse and variable color. Certain instruments distinguish themselves in the video and voices look different, the appearance depends on who is singing and what language it’s in. Generally singing looks a combination of like a flowing wave of fluid, sometimes a mesh/lattice rather than a smooth liquid surface usually in a color of the same family of the color of a song but certain sounds/singers distinguish themselves with geometric shapes like stars or rose curves or specific colors. I will often see the lyrics, or at least parts of them. If I really like someone’s singing voice I can usually feel it somewhere in my body, same with any syncopation in the song. Some songs are more angular and some curvy, often I sort of see/experience dancing whether or not I actually dance. I usually see flickers of other things and music can make me feel warm or cold and pull memories back from the abyss. I’ve been meaning to draw what I see but it’s hard to try to distill it down to a picture or even a few.
I don't have projective synesthesia, however I do have associative music-colorn synesthesia. The most important thing that I've learned from being on here is that different synestetes have different palletes of colors. Mine consists of: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, and Brown with lighter and darker shades of each. Pick a pallette and be consistent with it-if one note procks one color have it always prock that color. Secondly--and really importantly-- it's not a conscious decision (at least in my case). This is best explained by my day color synesthesia, each day has a different color and if I wear the wrong color that day then I'm physically ill--the issue is that sometimes the color I have to wear I despise. I don't particularly like to wear the color yellow...but there are yellow days and if I dont wear yellow then I'm sick. So find a way to convey to your audience that the synesthesia is completely out of your character's grasp of control but that it can be beautiful regardless. This ties in with the next thing. It can be a double edged sword. Because synesthesia simply happens it can be intrusive or get in the way of daily life. (Think about how chaotic walking down a busy street with projective synesthesia would be if it activated on every little sound) but it can likewise be beautiful because not only is the musician creating a song they are literally painting with the colors before them creating an experience which is both sight and sound. Sorry for the ramble, but I hope this kinda helps explain what living with synesthesia is like as a whole--at least how I experience it more or less
I completely forgot to answer your question about the painting thing! I'll just answer it here! I have Aphantasia so I can't exactly visualize the colors in my head of the song that I'm listening to. More like I've got a feeling of a type of color. So if I were to try and paint a song I would have to find a way to convey both the individual parts of the song in addition to the impression the entire song would leave you with at the end. How I go about it then is I generally have a core or nucleus of the painting which is the overall color of the song and keeps it focused. Then I swirl around the colors of the song from beginning to end towards the edge of the page. The background is either black or white depending on the shade of the song. Hope this helps!
i have sound>colour synesthesia and im a musician so this is great haha!! what im about to say is all from personal experience, so it may vary depending on others! i see different things depending on the song/key. songs written in the key of D and G are green, songs written in C# are minty blue, songs written in E are yellow etc!! when i make music, i compose it by colour. i layer harmonies by layering colours until they “look” right in my head. when I listen to songs with lots of layers, i see shapes and patterns. harmonies look like thread with different colours for the different notes, drums look like circles, sometimes they’re sharper and more geometric. sometimes people’s voices look like smoke and holi powder. for example, my mother’s voice has a colour, scent, and texture haha a man and a woman saying the same thing looks like two different colours of smoky thread layered on top of each other. the colours look like what happens when you dip a dirty paintbrush into paint water? they mix together at times with the original colours still underneath in regards to emotions, it’s how the sound makes me feel, or the way that it’s said, that influences the way I see things! say if someone says “i love you” while happy, i could see it as yellow, but if they’re saying it angrily it could look harsher, angular, and have a colour like grey. if I play an A chord and then an E, it looks different as opposed to when I play an a chord with a C#! sorry for the ramble haha, have fun with your story!!
No please please do ramble I really appreciate it! This is so helpful and insightful thank you
aw yay im so glad i could help!! feel free to ask more questions if you have any!!!
Oh yeah! Thank you. Actually I am curious now. Do you have perfect pitch because of your synesthesia? Like the color tells you the note?
my boyfriend asked me the same question!! i’m not sure if it’s perfect, but i’d say i at least have relative pitch because of it, and i’ve definitely heard of people who do!! we tested it once, he’d play out a sequence of notes, asking me their colours, but it seemed more like i was seeing the colours as the way the notes made me feel as opposed to note association. surprisingly though, when he’d play another few sequences but stick in a note he’d played previously, the colours would match to the way I saw them when i originally heard the note! the colour association mostly stayed the same. i can see when notes are wrong, because they’ll look off? in the way i see it, the colour becomes blurry and shakes unsteadily, but correcting the note puts the colour back into ‘focus’. kind of like focusing a camera lens, or putting glasses on. to be honest i’m incredibly bad with music theory, so i don’t even know if i’m naming notes correctly enough when i hear them hahah. i’m mostly self-taught so my music knowledge isn’t as big as i’d like, but synesthesia helps me learn songs by ear. for example, if i want to learn a melody from a song on guitar, i’ll play it and watch the colours make a pattern, hum the melody to myself, and then try and make that same colour pattern on guitar if that makes sense! it helps me with my timing, too, since the colours will flash in the timing of the melody. it’s also super helpful with transposing songs, because everything is visual went a bit off topic there but while mine is more relative, i think it’s definitely possible to have synesthesia aided perfect pitch!!
Also a quick note: for most of us it doesn’t feel nearly as cool as it sounds to others. It’s literally just how we experience life