I first heard of Synesthesia while watching a video of rising star Maggie Rogers sharing her music with Pharrell Williams. The two bonded over their sound-to-color Synesthesia, a relatively rare condition that allows them to see their music in colors. Yes, these people can SEE music/HEAR colors.
After watching the video, I was instantly intrigued to learn more about the condition. So I did a bit of research and this is what I found out:
"Synesthesia" means the union ("syn") of sensations ("aisthesis ")
Put simply, it's the blending of one's senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. In most cases, a person with this condition has two senses that work together simultaneously, consistently, and automatically on a daily basis. You can think of it as if a synesthetic has a bit of "cross-wiring" in their brain, with one sense's 'wires' overlapping another.
A synesthetic may smell chocolate every time they listen to jazz music, see the color yellow every morning when they hear the birds chirping, hear a certain song every time they see the one they love, or always see the word "popular" in the color blue.
Pretty incredible, right?
One form of this neurological condition that has been receiving a bit of attention in the media lately is sound-to-color synesthesia, the ability to hear colors. In addition to Pharell and Maggie's video, Teen Vogue recently released an article on Lorde's experience with synesthethesia. She explained a bit about how the ability can impact a musician's creative process, saying,
"If a song’s colors are too oppressive or ugly, sometimes I won’t want to work on it— when we first started "Tennis Court" we just had that pad playing the chords and it was the worst textured tan colour, like really dated, and it made me feel sick, and then we figured out that pre-chorus and I started the lyric, and the song changed to all these incredible greens overnight!”
One can only imagine that an artist's ability to visualize their music is helpful in the process of creating a cohesive music video. In my opinion, it's extremely clear in the video Maggie put together for the song she plays for Pharell in the video below, "Alaska."
The video is just as beautiful as the song and its different scenes are clearly represented by different colors.
Here's the video of Maggie and Pharrell briefly mentioning their Synesthesia. It's interesting to me that Maggie and Pharell close their eyes at times as they listen to the music.
It makes me wonder what colorful world they're imagining.
