Some People Really Can Taste The Rainbow | Hacker News Reader

Some People Really Can Taste The Rainbow

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Haha! I have it (synesthesia).

I always forget about it's not normal. By the way, mine was developed/intensified in my early teens due to psychedelic usage. I see the shape and colour of sounds like a video. To a certain extent, tactile sensory input, and even smells trigger visual patterns for me.

It's like having a mental HUD doing winamp visualizations 24/7. Sometimes gets a bit tiresome.

I didn't realise it wasn't normal until I was 11. We were on a coach trip back from a day drip to France and I said "Glad to be back in England, the road signs smell much better" and all my friends were horrified. My brother has it too, so we would often talk about it growing up, seemed normal to us...

What do different notes sound like? Are they variations upon a theme, or does each sound look completely unique?

The pitch of a sound mostly controls the size for me, so the same sound on different note is very similar. Amplitude makes almost no difference.

The texture makes them very unique though. Sub basses, like a deep sine is usually dark yellow for me, or sometimes very dark grey, and they are soft and very large, like an infinite floor.

Percussive elements tend to be round. Kickdrums usually look big, round, dark, with a hard and shiny edge if it is a rocky kickdrum with punch, and they look like a sphere cut in half if they are weak.

Here are a couple of more examples

- Trancy leads are the only sounds which I percieve turquoise

- Electro synths tend to be very bright yellow or orange

- Drum and bass basses are mudded grimey brown, grey, etc

- Flutes, sax and wind instruments are light yellow too, with a really interesting shape

- Guitar and similar pluck instruments also amaze me, they are very distinctive

- Violins are red, and very shiny, like fire.

For me at least, notes only make up part of the colour/feel. The tone, texture etc., of the notes makes more difference. Also notes change depending on context. A note out of no where on it's own will be a lot different if sounded next to other notes.

I think I may have some sort of this when it comes to music. I can't really concentrate when listening to music. I get so much into it, I can imagine a whole universe, like everything in the mix must have its visual space. When I compose/mix, I try to give everything its visual spot in the scene... it's weird. I can't tell how most people enjoy music so I don't know if this is """synesthesia""" or something else or whatever ... I just wanted to share how I enjoy/compose music !

EDIT: Also I always associate a track with a color. The vibe of the track has a color. The melody adds something to it. Music can get visual artwork to me.

Me too, listening to music invokes this for me. I see music. Not like musical notation on a staff. I see each component of a song progressing through space, melody as a line moving up and down, bass as the ground, percussion as punctuated puffs of air or smoke. The climax of a song is like a bird bursting up through layers of cloud into a clear sky. It's like my brain is permanently on a Winamp visualization. (Edit: dear ghod, someone else in this thread used that exact same metaphor. Freaky.)

That's about the only area of synesthesia for me, though. I don't have any crossover between taste and smell and other senses like the folks described in this article.

On my side it is just colors bursting out just like the winamp hehe. But sometimes, when I do very heavy/intense parts in my music, I try to imagine how well it would fit a firework final hahaha, sounds and special effects must be well placed, I don't know how to describe it better :) and I can imagine the positionning of everything related to the fireworks or colors, depending how I feel at the time I guess haha

I don't always associate a track with color. But when I relax and close my eyes with headphones on, my mind does involuntarily paint a whole universe of colors and shapes inspired by the music. Well, Vivaldi's four seasons paints distinctly worldly scenes. But Beethoven paints very abstract things.

And I love music, but hate to have it playing if I'm trying to concentrate on anything else.

But I never thought myself synesthetic. Just plain introverted. So now I wonder if this type of "over-stimulation", or increased sensitivity, is somewhat shared between all introverts and people with synesthesia?

I have something similar. Not so much the colors...but I get a definite sense of being in different kind of "spaces" depending on the music. Hard to describe as there's no real visual aspect to it, but I might feel like I'm in a small tight room with lots of fabrics in it for one song, and under a huge concrete dome for another. I have certain "rooms" that I look for when I search for music I like.

I also frisson to music, sometimes very hard, it feels like raw lightening is being pumped through me.

>I also frisson to music

I think this is pretty common. I mean, there's even a term for it, "give the chills"[1] - eg. "Listening to this track gave me the chills".

[1] http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/give%20the%...

It's fairly common in certain groups. I can't find the paper on it, but I think in the general populace it runs around 30% of the population.

My wife and none of her family for example, absolutely do not frisson. While my father and I do in my family, but none of my adopted siblings do. My mother may or may not, but she tends to fall into "religious experiences" through a variety of stimuli and it's hard to get her to succinctly describe the feeling.

I had never heard the word 'frisson' before, and I had no idea that some people didn't do it to music. Happens to me all the time. Interesting.

I don't know if it is an English word but it's part of the French language as "to have a chill" or I don't know the correct expression/word in English :)

In English it has a similar, but slightly different meaning.

Here's some more info on it

http://www.cogsci.msu.edu/DSS/2008-2009/Huron/HuronFrisson.p...

Same about the frisson part :) When the melody is well done and unpredictable on first listen... this can become a drug, the need to find new music to get this feeling

I'm like this too. Different styles of music take me to different places. I never liked 90s rock because it always took me to the same place: it looked like the yard of some neighbors I had who didn't know the meaning of "cleaning", whose lawn was piled with junk and whose pool had developed its own ecosystem.

The first time I booted up Rez I thought to myself: "whoa, this looks just like trance music."

Sounds like it. I used to have quite vague ideas of colours and shapes when hearing sounds but years of listening to music gave it more structure. Though I do also get it with days, a little bit with hours in the day and months in the year... though that's another story :)

I remember people asking me if I took drugs when creating music since I make psychedelic trance overall hahaha. I never took drugs but it's funny how I enjoy music in a similar way to people who take psychedelic drugs. Mine is more analytical but in the end we all see shapes and color. :P

The early logo for the Web was influenced by the fact that Robert Cailliau, who co-developed the web with TBL, has synaesthetia (one of the few things I remember from the First Web Conferece at CERN):

http://www.siggraph.org/publications/newsletter/volume-42-nu...

The logo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WWW_logo_by_Robert_Ca...

It seems somewhat strange that somebody whose sense for taste is completely different from most people should rate wines for them.

For what i understand, he can distinguish certain characteristics of the wine better thanks to the amplified perception that synesthesia gives.

So in reality it's far less interesting then people think, for every musician who has see colors in music there is someone like me who sees words and numbers with different colors depending on first digit/letter.

I ... sort of have it. I have always associated specific colors and genders with numbers and letters. Like, a B is pink, and an O is white, and a T is male, and a D is female. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with their typographic characteristics. It's just something that has always been the case for me, and hasn't changed over time.

I'm not certain it's true synesthesia, because gender isn't really a sensory thing in the same way that color and taste are, but I feel at least a kinship with synesthetes.

I think synesthesia is so weird that nobody is certain what is true synesthesia ;)

I wonder if there are different levels of synesthesia. I'd never heard of it before this article, but I've tried describing to my father how sushi and tomatoes taste "blue" where things like salami taste "red" ...he couldnt relate at all.

That's not as strong as the sense as described in this article, and I don't see the colors, so I don't know what's going on.

I gave numbers personality when I was a kid. "That Asshole #7"

I don't have synesthesia. But when I see some commercial brands take a common word and intentionally misspell it. That bothers me a lot.

Apostrophe abuse especially. Not so much when it is a simple mistake of its or it's. I make that mistake myself. But when a brand deliberately sticks an apostrophe in the middle of a word.

Call me pedantic. But I wonder if our pedantic sense which makes us perceive some things as just wrong, is connected to synesthesia?

Instinctively it seems we are all born with a proclivity to spot patterns and associations. And to be able to learn which patters are preferred over others. Even for purely arbitrary (cultural) reasons. So it seems we all have a kind of innate sense which lets us feel good or bad about certain patterns and associations.

I wonder if synesthesia is an over active version of that? Where any pattern triggers strong emotions?

You mean like Synthesia? http://www.synthesiagame.com/

I read a fiction book (probably not translated to English) where there was a tribe who used tastes and flavours as a language. That's right: they didn't talk, instead they mixed drinks where they would put all the words, grammar, punctuation and even the fine print.

And food was for tales and epics.

They were also blind.

There are some smells and tastes that I have invented, over half of them are awful, but some of them I wish I could communicate to people. The best I can do at the moment is explain the shapes and colours over time...

They didn't communicate tastes. They communicated using tastes.

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