Acoustic Drawing

For those of you who have been wondering about when I'm posting another drawing here it is. This drawing is of one of my favorite songs by an indy artist out of Nashville.

The song is called 'Breathe With Me' by Jeremy Lister. (who, by the way is insanely talented so you should go listen to his other stuff)

This song for me is mostly blue from the actual music and the artist's voice.

The reason there is red around the edges and layered with rectangles is because that is what I see when I hear an acoustic guitar.

Since my type of sound-color synesthesia comes from musical sounds and not pitch, different instruments have different colors and patterns. In most songs where the majority of the instruments are electric their original colors can easily get lost. 'Breathe With Me' is acoustic, so the sound of the guitar isn't altered or overshadowed..

For this drawing I started by blocking out the rectangles and outlining them with either red or blue. After I finished the outline I colored in the three blue lines which are the voice and melody lines. The next step was to finish by lightly shading in each of the rectangles. I was trying to fade the red from the guitar into the blue of the song.

So far this is one of my favorite drawings.

Sensory Overload

As much as I love having sound-color synesthesia I have found some negative aspects to it. The main problem I have a lot of the time is having to deal with sensory overload. Because I perceive sound with two different senses, it can be pretty easy for me to get overwhelmed in very loud situations. For me, when I experience sensory overload, I feel like my vision and hearing are basically useless leaving me very confused and disoriented. My solution? Curling up while covering my ears and keeping my eyes shut as tight as I can.

This is the reason I normally don't go to concerts because pretty much every concert I've gone to has ended with extreme sensory overload. Some of the factors the contribute to this not-so-lovely experience...

• The Loud Music
• The louder that music gets, the brighter the colors get.
• The Crowds
• Crowds unnerve me in any situation. There are too many voices and all of the get mixed together and turn into black and I can't pull out a single voice.  
• If people try to talk to me, I usually can't understand them unless they're screaming in my ear or I'm looking directly at them. 
• The Lights, Smoke and other special effects performers feel they have to use. 
• I'm already seeing bright, loud bursts of color and many times the stage lights are different colors than what I'm hearing and pointing at the audience. 

Now combine all of these together and I just can't take it. The last concert I went to was about about a year ago and part way through a couple of people I was there with had to half carry me out of the arena. 

Of course this doesn't happen to this extent that often. Many times I just get confused and have trouble processing information but I can still function. This is not that uncommon for other synesthetes as well, especially with people who have crossed hearing, vision, taste and touch. Since people with synesthesia are interpreting the same stimuli twice that brain has to work a little bit harder to keep up. Researchers have done test such as MRIs and PET scans on synesthetes and the results have shown that both areas of the brain activate when they are exposed to whatever perception induces their synesthesia. 

Overall, it's not all fun and games but I still love it. 

Some People Just Never Grow Up

There are a lot of theories about how synesthesia occurs in the brain. They’re usually divided up into two different categories

• Result of Normal Brain Function
• There’s nothing wrong or structurally unusual with a synethete’s brain, it just works a bit differently. 
• Result of Abnormal Brain Function
• A synethete’s brain has some structurally wrong with it which results in crossed perceptions

The theory that has interested me the most falls into the first category. It’s comes from the process known as neonatal pruning.  When a baby is born, their brain is full of extra connections and firing synapses. As the brain matures, these extra connections are “pruned”.

Researcher Daphne Maurer suggested that everyone is born synesthetic, but during the process of neonatal pruning, the synapses that join the senses are disconnected. For people with synesthesia, some of the connections were skipped over during the process.

This theory also explains the phenomena of people that report synesthetic perceptions as a child but they disappeared when they reached puberty. A child’s brain does not reach maturity until around 12-years-old.  

Personally, this explanation is also my favorite. The main reason is that it’s better than being told that my synesthesia is actually a mental disorder that needs to be cured.  I find that hard to believe since I love having synesthesia and as I have mentioned before, it is not a health risk. 

So I finally got around to scanning in some of my drawings and here is the first.
This my representation of what I hear when I listen to the song 'Handlebars' by the Flobots. If you haven't heard the song yet you can listen to it here.

There is a specific process that I go through to create these drawings.

• The first thing I do is pull out the patterns I hear and sketch them out. When I do this I have to listen to the song over and over again and pick out each individual element. This step usually takes around 20 minutes. 
• Since my sound-color synesthesia is musical sounds, each specific voice and instrument will have a certain pattern or color, so to recreate what I see means I have to pull the image in my head apart, then put it back to together on paper.  
• The next step is deciding what colors to use. I do this on a separate sheet of paper since I have to experiment to recreate the colors I want. Many times I also have to mix the colors to create the shade that is closest to the colors I want. 
• In my drawing of  'Handelbars' the only colors I didn't mix were the black and the jade green line. 
• After I know the pattern I want to use and the colors, I have to decide where each color goes. Again it is like putting together a puzzle. 
• Most of the time I do have an idea of what colors I am going to use and where they will go but it's never certain until I start coloring them in.
• Once everything is decided on I color in the patterns. I usually listen to the song throughout this entire process. 

Since my synesthetic perceptions are very general the drawings tend to be a little more elaborate then what I actually hear. But I'm also trying to show all of the elements that are combined into what I hear/see. 

All my drawings are done with colored pencils and I'll put a couple more up soon. 

How Many of Us Are There?

When I was little, I thought everyone heard colors like I did. I didn’t realize I was “special” until my first grade art class. My teacher, turned on some music and said to color what we saw when we listened to the music. I remember getting very frustrated because I couldn’t find the right blue for my drawing. When I complained to my teacher he showed me almost every shade of blue he could find in his class room. When I didn’t find the color we had the following conversation.

My Teacher: “Can you describe the blue you want?”

Me: “It’s really hard, I don’t know to describe it. It’s the blue I heard in the music.”

My Teacher:“… you heard it in the music.”

Me:“yeah, it’s the blue I heard in my head.”

My Teacher: “…I think you’re mixing up what you hear and see.”

Me: “You don’t hear colors when you listen to music?”

My Teacher: “You can’t hear colors in music. No one can. You just have an overactive imagination.”

Me: “… I still can’t find the blue I need.”

My Teacher: “Just use one of the blues I gave you.”

Many synesthetes have this type of experience when they’re young. Once they find out that their perceptions are not normal, they usually do what I did and shut up about them. This is one of the main reason there is no set number of how many people have synesthesia. Guesses have ranged from 1 person out of 23 to one out of 2000 and up to one out of a million. Most people don’t talk about their synesthesia after childhood to avoid getting made fun of or just because other people just don’t understand.

Other reasons why no one exactly how many synesthetes there are include:

• Some people just don’t know they have it
• Synesthesia is not a common term. I didn’t know my colored hearing had a name until a couple of months ago when I enrolled in my Visual Music course that covered the subject

• There is no concrete way to diagnose synesthesia.
•   I’ve brought this up before, but synesthesia is completely subjective. Each synesthete has their own experiences. Combined with the numerous forms of synesthesia, this makes it very hard to tell if synesthetic perceptions are actually real.

The awareness of synesthetic perception is the basis for almost every reason synesthesia is so hard to figure out. The fact that perceptions are different for everyone or synesthetes just don’t notice them, just make synesthesia even more fascinating. 

I Know How You Feel...

So upon further research I have discovered that I more than one type of synesthesia. Along with sound-color I also have a rarer type called Mirror-Touch synesthesia, which is a type that deals with emotion.
When put into simple turns when I see a person I can easily sense their emotions. I had always thought this was simple intuition until I read the description of it during my research.

Another part of mirror-touch synesthesia is that when I see someone get hurt, I can feel the pain as well. One example of this is when I see someone get a shot, I feel the needle prick on my arm as they get it.

This also applies to things I see in pictures or on TV. For instance I have never been able to watch an entire slasher flick without hiding my eyes at some point.

The fact that I have more than one type of synesthesia is pretty normal. People who have one type, especially a common type like my sound-color, usually have another. Carol Steen is one known example of this with multiple types of synesthesia which she incorporate in her art. She is also the co founder of the American Synesthesia Association.

There are types that are more uncommon than others but it's hard to say how rare they are when most researchers don't even have an accurate idea how common or rare synesthesia is in general. There are several reasons for why it's so hard to estimate, but we'll get into those next time.

More Than One Kind?

My uncle and one of my closest friends are the only other people I’ve met that have some form of synesthesia. My uncle and I both have sound-color synesthesia but my friend Celia has a rarer form that’s called number-spatial form synesthesia. It’s even harder to explain in detail but the gist of it is that when she sees number lines or lists of numbers, in her head she sees a 3 dimensional line stretching out with the higher numbers further away. Each number has its own level of exposure and shadow which changes the higher the numbers go.

There are dozens of documented forms of synesthesia, because of the numerous combinations of senses. What most people don’t know is that there are more senses that can be affected by synesthesia than just the basic five.

• Time
• Space
• Emotion
• Personality
• Language

To name a few.

Some of these don’t seem like senses but are still classified as synesthetic experiences because they are paired with a sensation they normally wouldn't be. The experiences are also still automatic and involuntary. When the definition of synesthesia was expanded beyond sight, taste, hearing, smell and touch, the combinations of sense went from about 25 to an almost infinite amount. Types of synesthesia are still being discovered, especially with recent research.  

The types of synesthesia that involve more obscure combinations of senses are usually rarer than forms that mix the basic five.  You can read about other forms of synesthesia here.

Or you could just wait for me to blog about them ;) 

Time for a Little History Lesson

If you’ve never heard of synesthesia you’re among the majority. Synethesia is one of those conditions you read about on a “20 weird conditions” list you find online, and then wonder if they’re actually real. Here’s a fact that will blow your mind… The first documented case of synesthesia was in 1812 when George Sachs wrote a dissertation about his own synesthetic experiences. Research on synesthesia was continued by Sir Francis Galton during 1880s.

But at the turn of the century scientists lost interest and synesthesia was ignored until around the mid 80s. But there are several reasons why synesthesia was forgotten.

• There is no concrete way to diagnose synesthesia
• Synesthetes often reported symptoms for their synesthesia that differed from other synesthetes, or would report a completely different combination of senses. 
• Synesthetic experiences often sound like symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis
• Synesthesia is harmless and doesn't interfere with daily life.

I'll go into more detail for each of these later on. 

For me, the history of synesthesia, or lack thereof, makes sense because it can be very hard to explain. I don’t know why a piano sounds like blue circles and I can’t describe it beyond that general color and shape. Combine a subject who can’t accurately explain what they see/hear/feel and a scientist who wants hard facts and data, it doesn't really work out that well.

I'm going to start going into some of my personal experiences later this week so stay tuned. You can read more about the history of synesthesia as well as some other aspects of synesthesia if you feel like it. 

Hearing Color... Literally!

I've always been able hear colors and textures in music and peoples' voices and that it wasn’t normal, but I didn’t know there was actually a name for what I was experiencing. Synesthesia literally means the combining of the senses. When a normal person perceives something, it’s only with one sense. For synesthetes, one sense will automatically and involuntarily trigger another. 

My sound-color synesthesia triggers colors, shapes and textures when I hear music and voices. One example is the voice of a classmate that's a sticky mixture of fluorescent pink and orange. 

On my blog you can find

• Research and Facts about Synesthesia
• My personal experiences 
• Links to other sites, articles and blogs about synesthesia 

If you want some more information on synesthesia, check out this article in Scientific American