Thursday, February 19, 2004

INTERESTING PIECE ON SYNESTHESIA: I'm
interested in this. I'm quite a synesthetist myself,
experiencing sound in visual terms. (Based on my experience,
this is true of most sound engineers, and many musicians).
The sound of falling rain "looks" like polkadots. A kick drum
hit looks kind of like an overstuffed pillow, with the shape
and size varying according to tone. Electric guitars look
like multicolored spaghetti.

I suspect that this is actually useful, allowing more brain
processing power to go to work on a problem. I can "see"
differences in sound (like the difference between two nearly- identical delay times) that I can't really hear directly. I
think lots of people who work with sound have similar
experiences, though I wonder whether this is developed
through the work, or whether people with those
characteristics tend to go into such things. Perhaps some of
both, though I've experienced sound this way since I was a
kid. (from Instapundit)



ABC News

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