Synaesthesia

Started by SueC, October 23, 2019, 16:26:40

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SueC

Hello everyone  :)

I heard a really interesting programme today featuring an 11-year-old girl with synaesthesia explaining how she experiences the world.  For example, describing how when she plays saxophone, she sees colours (the type of which depend on the notes, tone etc) and shapes:

QuoteAnd this is Eliza jamming on the saxophone with her teachers Benny and Lachie.

Eliza Watt: One of my favourite things about playing the saxophone is seeing the colours, and that's one of the times that I do pay quite a lot of attention to them. And they come from the back of my head and shoot off really fast to a point in the distance. Probably three metres away from me. Sometimes it'll be a bit late, like I'll play a note that's green, and then green will come a few seconds later. Or sometimes it'll be right on the dot and it'll happen straight away.

Lynne Malcolm: Do emotions affect the colours that you're seeing and the music you're playing?

Eliza Watt: Yeah, how I'm feeling definitely affects what sort of pieces I play, which affects what colours there are. But I don't think my emotions have a very big impact on my colours.

Lynne Malcolm: What colour does the saxophone connote to you?

Eliza Watt: Overall it's a yellow instrument, but the noises are often quite blue—dark blue and green. When I play it it's more yellowy-greenish. Sometimes a bit of pink because I like to play in the higher octaves. And that's quite a high colour for me.


There's also lots of this all across her life.  The podcast is downloadable from here:

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/synesthesia:-seeing-sounds-and-hearing-colours/9836826

Anyone here with any sort of synaesthesia they're aware of?

Or anything else unusual that happens in your brain when you listen to music, etc?

The catch is that many more mild synaesthetes are unaware of being so - because this is how it always was for them - their normal - and if it's a mild thing, it may not be very obvious that the perception is different from the norm.
SueC is time travelling