Depending, music gives me sensations of color and texture, but not quite sure if it's synesthesia
Hi! So, I've always experienced music in a very intense way, but recently I've started to think that what happens when I listen to music might qualify as synesthesia.
The most intense and the most frequent sensation for me is that certain instrument timbres have textures for me, in my mind's eye. They're real enough that I feel like I can touch them, but they don't exist in space. For example, I was recording an album recently and, at one point, my guitar part sounded like touching a big, round piece of brass, which wasn't what I was going for. My current rig, when it's clean, has a a vaguely squishy but still solid and slightly metallic texture full of divots. This happens for basically all instruments that I hear, but it feels like it could also just be internalized metaphors. After all, people describe music as having texture all the time.
I also experience sound to color synesthesia, usually related to particular melodies and, again, timbres. This is less frequent- most of the music I like has colors associated with it, but the sensation isn't always there and isn't there for a lot of types of music. More than anything, I experience it when I'm writing guitar parts. A part won't really be right until it has the right color.
These two sensations tend to combine fairly frequently, too, so that stereotypical shoegaze guitar chords (think lots of distortion, reverb and chorus) are big, soupy, vaguely electric clouds swirling with soft pinks and oranges. The high background synths in the verse of Charli XCX's "Focus" are white, squishy and a little rubbery. Sometimes when I'm writing, the song will appear in my mind's eye as a landscape made up of those different textures and colors, including parts we maybe haven't written yet.
Has anyone had similar experiences? Would this qualify as synesthesia?
Posted Dec 6, 2018, 1:14 AM UTC