
My Sudden Synaesthesia - anotherevan
https://mosaicscience.com/story/-synaesthesia-blind-seeing-colours-synasthesia
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in3d
I have weed-induced music -> shape, texture, etc. synesthesia. Each instrument
(or voice) in a song has its associated brightness, shape, texture, size,
location in space, and they all are animated with the song. This form is much
less common than the types of synesthesia relating to colors but I think it's
the most fun. There are quite a few consistencies that make sense to people
who don't have it: lower frequency sounds look darker, louder sounds are
larger, drums have a "sandy" (non-solid) texture. It all comes together and
makes the song look beautiful.

I'd like to make a VR animation for one song to show others how it looks
sometime. There are some videos produced by others but I don't think they give
the full experience and they are missing something. On the other hand, I'm
happy I don't have this ability normally because I would've probably gotten
involved in some music-related field and that might not be a great career
path. It seems to make music composition much more intuitive and just
"obvious."

A couple good books on the subject: "Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia" and
"Sensory Blending: On Synaesthesia and related phenomena."

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shostack
On the other hand, I wonder how much of a competitive edge someone with
synesthesia would have with music over someone without it.

My understanding is you can perceive when music looks/feels/smells right or
whatever your sensory blend is, which means you can perceive things that work
well together that others might not. Of course I could be completely wrong
about this.

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garrettdc
IIRC one or more of the members of Tool has synaesthesia for reference.

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alexandersingh
Off the top of my head, Jimi Hendrix had it...and Blood Orange

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tbirrell
Discovering you have (what this article calls) classic synaesthesia is a very
interesting experience. Suddenly many many things fall into place, but you
also realize you experience the world in a fundamentally different manner than
anyone else.

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keeganjw
I remember I was 18, at college, and was eating in the dining hall with my
friends one evening. We somehow started talking about our favorite colors and
I said my favorite color was yellow probably because my name looks so yellow.
They stopped eating and stared at me like I was crazy. They asked how does
your name look yellow? I was like, what do you mean, it just is yellow. Do
words not have colors for you? And just saying that out loud I realized how
bizarre that sounded and that I didn't have an explanation for it. I honestly
had never thought that much about the fact that words had colors for me. They
proceeded to ask me what colors a ton of words were and then tested me again a
few days later to see if I said the same things because they didn't believe
me.

And that's how I found out I had synaesthesia.

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liberte82
Do you actually physically see yellow with your eyes or is it more in your
mind, or a feeling of yellowness? Also do different people with synaesthaesia
see the same colors for the same words?

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evincarofautumn
With my grapheme→colour and word→colour synaesthesia, it’s definitely in my
mind—when I look at the letter A, for example, my brain has the same
_reaction_ as if I were looking at a yellow object, even though I can see that
it’s not actually yellow.

An upside of synaesthesia is that I have very good clerical accuracy, which is
helpful for programming—typographical errors “stick out” because things appear
the wrong colour. A downside is that I can’t really use syntax highlighting,
because I find it distracting. This is what my terminal Emacs looks like:
[https://imgur.com/m76W8eF](https://imgur.com/m76W8eF) (with soft wrapping
because there’s not really a line length limit in this codebase).

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pcl
The article described an SSD (sensory substitution device) that converts a
particular color under a stylus into a sound.

I wonder if you could build an SSD that did a playback of a 2-dimensional scan
of an input image in such a way that a blind person could rebuild the
2-dimensional image. Perhaps the brain could pick up something akin to CRT
horizontal scan lines. Also, I wonder whether stereophonic output would be
advantageous.

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joelg
This is actually exactly the topic of the 3Blue1Brown video on Hilbert Curves:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s7h2MHQtxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s7h2MHQtxc)

Space-filling curves are a sort of optimal mapping strategy for compressing
two dimensions down into one.

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marzell
I find it easy to approximate various flavor types with audible pitches.
Bitter flavors are deep bass, oils tend to be a little higher, complex carbs
are a bit higher, sweets are in the middle or a little higher (carbs and
sugars make up the 'vocal range' in my estimation), and sour flavors are way
up high. People have tried to convince me that this is a mild/odd
synaesthesia, but I feel it may just be imagination and an overeagerness to
draw parallels/similies.

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adg002
So, Sensory Substitution Device. There's an app for that?

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adg002
I've just found out this [http://tdwright.github.com/Creole-
SSD/](http://tdwright.github.com/Creole-SSD/)
[https://github.com/tdwright](https://github.com/tdwright)

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duxup
I wonder how far Vanessa has been able to recover.

