Sound Advice
Volume 11, Issue 3, 2008

Can You Hear Pictures?

Can you hear pictures or see sounds? What shape is Beethoven’s 5th? What color is the number 4? Is George Bush like baked potatoes or Tony Blair like dried coconut? Is Saturday orange or yellow, and is Thursday round or jagged? If you can answer any of these questions, it’s likely that you have a condition called synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia occurs when a person’s senses get mixed up. What you or I may perceive as an audio stimulus that our brain acknowledges as sound actually stimulates a totally different part of a synaesthetic person’s brain. Sound becomes color and shape, or even taste. Sight becomes sound. That’s why one synaesthetic guy reported to the BBC that when he hears the name “George Bush”, he tastes potatoes, whereas “Tony Blair” brings the sweet taste of dried coconut to his mouth.

The BBC also reported on a synaesthetic female doctor who finally gave up a twenty-year medical practice to become a fulltime artist. Every time she heard music, the former doctor saw colors and shapes. After retiring from medicine, she became the artist-in-residence for the Cambridge University Musical Society, sitting in on their rehearsals and reproducing on canvas the colors and shapes of the music they played.

While it may seem to the rest of us that this condition may be the result of random sensory stimuli / neuron misfires, that’s not the case. To the man described above, those names always produce the same tastes. If he tries to recall a person’s name, he experiences a series of different tastes until he gets to the right one.  The ex-doctor is able to record the Musical Society’s renderings and play the music back to herself over time to create her artistic works, because the sound always creates for her the same mental colors, patterns and shapes; it becomes for her, in effect, a recorded video.

The condition of synaesthesia, now being studied at Edinburgh University, is not a mental illness or temporary condition. It seems that about 1 person in 2,000 is born “hard-wired” with these sensory crossovers, and synaesthetics couldn’t imagine perceiving their world any other way. 

There’s an online test you can take to determine if you have this condition. Just go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7546875.stm. Click on the video of dots. Can you can hear them moving?

It’s good that the Wieland Acoustics’ staff aren’t synaesthetic. Can you imagine what your noise study would say? “The ambient noise was purple and spiky...” or “the peak-hour freeway noise tastes like a Big Mac...” No, happily for our clients, we just hear what we hear and see what we see, and report it as accurately as we can!

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