Synesthesia: The Sound of Style | Hacker News Reader

Synesthesia: The Sound of Style

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42 pointskrawczstef10 comments

This is cool, but it's not synesthesia. Synesthesia is literally a neurological phenomona. I have it, and it's very real. It's not simply an algorithmic encoding.

I think you missed something. It's not claiming to be synesthesia, but it is inspired by it.

I've never known anyone with it, what is it actually like? I am colorblind and I experience some colors as a visual vibration. I assume this is also not synesthesia, but it does help me pick out certain colors that I don't see as different from another color.

It could be synesthesia.

There are many, many forms of synesthesia out there, and some are much more common than others.

When I listen to music I see colours in my head. Different keys have different colours.

Personally I find

Gm is a dark reddy brown

A is red

Am tends to be deep purple or bluey red

Bm is blue

B is greeny yellow

C is yellow

Cm is dark yellowy green

D is a bright happy green

Dm is a dark bluey green

E and em are different shades a light blue.

It's hard to explain but one is kind of darker feeling. E has more of a whiter tinge to it.

It's all kind of subjective though. It really depends on the son and the instruments used. Each instrument adds it's own texture and variation to the colour.

I dunno when I listen to music it's like a moving painting in my mind that changes with the different parts of the song.

It's one of the reasons I would like to try mescaline. It's supposed to give you visual synesthesia.

Also, as a side note. I'm also colourblind. Not too had, i don't really notice it much in my day to day life but I fail the red green colour tests and i'm not very visually artistic. Part of my job involves mixing colour and I usually need someone to double check and see if it matches properly.

I love music though. I've been playing musical instruments most of my life and I dunno I find music helps relieve stress for me more than a lot of things.

What happens when a note is off?

Depends. Different tones outside of the normal musical keys have colours they just tend to be less distinct, more blends of other colours' incorrect notes in the middle of a performance are kind of like someone taking random colours and throwing them on a painting.

I dunno it's hard to describe, the overall key of a song provides...uh the background colour I guess...while the actual notes and chords played are where the actual pictures come from. So a note from the wrong key or something is the wrong colour. It just kind of sticks out in a bad way from the rest.

I dunno. I'm sorry if that's kind of vague and unclear. It's a hard thing to describe. I never really thought about it until I started to get serious about learning music theory. I just always could guess when two songs were in the same key by their colour, but didn't actually know what those keys were.

It's not always straightforward, even the tempo makes a difference and different modes or even intervals can be different. Lower octaves are usually darker than higher ones. I really wish I could explain it better.

I think it's a pretty good explanation of a very strange phenomenon. It makes me wish I could experience it. I'm pretty tone deaf, and it took me years to figure out how to even tune my guitar properly (the breakthrough was being able to feel the vibrations through the neck of the guitar).

Do you get anything from the drums?

Yea, honestly it's probably not synesthesia. Information processing, the memory of a thing overlaid on top of something similar enough. Reasoning by analogy... imprecise.

I know someone who sometimes temporarily has synesthesia. They remarked once that they taste colors at such times.

I don't pretend to understand it.

As someone with synesthesia, "typecasting" one sensory experience to some other sensory experience is not the same thing at all, and will almost certainly be considered the "wrong" result by anyone with synesthesia. That sound does not make that shape/image and vice versa.

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