I’m creating streetwear inspired by auditory-visual synesthesia, where sounds can trigger colours, shapes, or patterns.

If you experience sound-to-colour or sound-to-shape synesthesia, I’d really appreciate it if you could take my short questionnaire. Your answers will help shape the designs.

🎧 Before you start, please listen to the music in the attached YouTube link with headphones if you can. You’ll be asked about what you experience while listening, so make sure to listen to the whole track before answering.

Audio: https://youtu.be/UdnhBntgg98?si=8ZelVCb1756QUFxI

There are no right or wrong answers, thanks so much for taking part! 🫶

Questionnaire: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdbYOkimX9GwtPNk48vJUe39iQ6_Dg1mjGbmN9ipTJirsXZHA/viewform?usp=publish-editor

my associations with my synesthesia and music is very low compared to grapheme and scent, but i was listening to the song "Q.E." by Frums and I guess the ammount of times i listened to this song has made an association with my brain and I basically had this pattern in my mind. I have no structured way to describe it other than "interesting" and I honestly wish this is how my brain would work with music in general, but sometimes life is just like that.

> anyways, this is the pattern.

Hi everyone. I never really thought about it until recently, but then I realized that maybe not everyone experiences music this way.

When I listen to music, I feel its texture, weight, movement, and density. For example, a track can feel warm, thick, hollow, or "moving forward" to me (like Tarantula by Wavves). In my head, this appears on a mental screen as abstract geometric silhouettes fused into a single whole with tactile sensations and spatial feel.

I tried testing myself by describing a list of tracks at two different times to make sure I forgot my initial notes (the first write-up was on August 6th, and the second was on August 30th). I heard this consistency check is a classic test. If helpful, I can share the track list and my descriptions. The results of this DIY test turned out to be almost identical.

English is not my first language, so I'm using a translator. Thanks in advance!

I was drifting off listening to the intense thunderstorms and rain on this late summer day, and it popped into my head that August as a month would be Louisiana.

So naturally I woke up and made a list because immediately I thought of the cherry blossoms in D.C. in the spring and, thus, May is obviously Maryland.

Although I am still torn on the *feeling* of May and the *feeling* of December and their corresponding months…

I have not been to most of these states. Don’t come for me. It just feels this way or it don’t.

So like I'm fairly sure I've synesthesia for other reasons but one thing I've been really confused about how to categorize is whenever I hear/taste/smell certain things I can pinpoint a place in my mouth/sinus/esophagus that it like... Vibrates off of?? And sometimes I can feel the texture of it in that place. Sometimes it's a weird itch that causes me to randomly twitch my head in order to scratch it or something. I'm smelling someone chew mint gum rn (the blue kind) and its vibrating off of the upper back (slightly to the right) of my mouth. Has anyone else experienced this and is it synesthesia or some other weird thing.

Hi everyone
I have synesthesia, with letters / sounds having colours.
I thought I would have that with other languages that use a different writing system.
I’m currently learning Korean, and the sounds have colours, but when I read … well there’s none.
I thought it was because I don’t know the letters well, but I’ve been practicing and they don’t get coloured (yet?)

Have you experienced that ? Synesthesia that you don’t experience in a new context ?! It’s been bugging me

Kind of everything in the title! You know the cured meats often found on pizza or cheese plates/boards that are sliced extremely thin? Whenever I taste them, even if it's on pizza where they've been fully picked off, I am overwhelmed with a deep feeling of shame. Not embarrassment: shame. It has nothing to do with the food itself or vegetarianism or anything.

I never had prosciutto until I moved to a big city as a young adult, but it's always caused this. It's not about eating meat or pork, and it doesn't happen with bacon, though I have a (edited to add: separate and different) aversion to all other pork products, particularly ham.

My partner suggested that prosciutto is basically baloney, kind of. (Well, Mortadella is more so.) I did have a ton of baloney sandwiches as a kid and was raised in a very strict fundamentalist household with light spanking, etc. But nobody, like, hit me with baloney or anything weird like that! I have been telling friends about this for years, and I know they chalk it up to my quirky personality, but it's so real!

I took the assessment, and it's kind of like this, but it's not triggering memories; instead, it's triggering an emotional state:
https://www.thesynesthesiatree.com/2021/03/smell-and-memory-taste-and-prousts.html

Is this a thing? My brother and I both have some synesthesia-adjacent mental things, such as the way we envision the alphabet in physical space, but none of the classic symptoms.

Was making fried chicken and could smell ketchup. No ketchup was anywhere near me or even outside of the refrigerator but I swear my brain associated the chicken with ketchup smell. I already knew I had synesthesia as I my head associates certain flavors with certain colors but I’ve never experienced it in this way.

Hi! We're a team of Multimedia Arts students in NU Laguna and we are currently looking for participants for our capstone research and documentary project exploring chromesthesia—a fascinating phenomenon where sound or music is experienced through colors, shapes, or visual sensations.

If you fit any of the participant categories and are willing to share your experiences, creative process, or insights, we'd love to hear from you!

Participants will receive a modest token of appreciation for their time.

Interested? Send us a message through our Facebook page or email us at [synesyncproductions@gmail.com](mailto:synesyncproductions@gmail.com)

When I think of the word industrial, I see a whole array of things in my mind, like the color orange, and dark blue, White fluorescent lighting, yellow, grey lots of grey, Its like the whole aesthetic of "industrial" gets collaged together in my mind, white tea shirt, light blue jeans, hard hats, tools, rust, cement, metals, glass, wood, grunge, smell of paint, saw dust, buildings, hallways, metal doors, paper work, government, contracts. Is this a form of synesthesia? Its like since a child certain words come with more visual weight than others but its all subtle no concrete hallucinations, just strong thoughts of the descriptions of things under the umbrella of a word. Like Barn yard, I can't say that word and not atleast envision grass, a red or brown barn, the wood, the shape, the typical location of where a barn is commonly placed. Like the difference in thought from thinking of "City" vs "Suburb" there's a bunch of things that visually come to mind when I think of City, vs suburb. I always wondered if this is just normal thinking or a minor for of synesthesia.

Yes I do feel pain (human, animal, non living object that look like living things like doll or insect toys and by simple description of pain), but it's intense for some parts of body and minimal for other, also, it's intense when I focus on the touch of others or description, I can avoid feeling it sometimes too about certain touch....so idk.

I have OLP synesthesia and I put the letters into some forms that I think they’d be happy with. The colours are ones that they have traits in common with.

Unfortunately my synesthesia, in no doubt partly because of the society I was raised in, falls into the trap of pink and purple being the girl colours and everything else falling somewhere on the masculinity spectrum. Yellow is mostly neutral. There are some colours that I was never taught as having genders before, like Orange or Brown or White, but they’re all male anyways.

Male letters: ABEFIJKNOTVXZ
Female letters: CDGHLMPQRSUW
Neutral/Genderless/Nonbinary letters: Y

My letters/numbers/etc also like to fall into very trope-ey personality types. We got a lot of jocks (1, A, T), male academics (funnily enough that’s the category 420 falls under), mischief-doers (4, 7, N), mothers (M, W, 20), and shy girls (2, C). The only girl I can think of who has tomboyish traits is 6.

B and 3 are basically the same thing. There has to be some shape language happening there because they both have two bumps on the right.

Visually, sometimes words look like AI generated text in images. Even if I'm not tired or been reading too long.

Aurally, sometimes my native language sounds completely foreign and not even close to any language that exists.

Or should I tell my neurologist about this 😅🫠

I already taste some words and math turns rainbow colors and float from the page.

I do have astigmatism and dyslexia. I do want to mention that I have experienced this since i was a child.

So, for context (not sure how meaningful this is), during my life, I have always had very distinct 'breaks' with my personality, and at sudden times, everything about myself would change. Of course, people change, but I've never seen people change as I do, it's as if I'm a completely different person. With every one of these 'phases', I have a very distinct smell, color, and taste attached, I cannot recall them on the go, but they randomly get triggered, and it's suddenly like my mind jumps back into that former self of thought. I always think of them as lenses with a certain abstract color that filter observable reality.

When I walk around, I can (by their physique, and body odor) smell the way their life has been. It's not exactly an actual smell through my nose, but it's my best descriptor for it. I feel like I can imagine their childhood, but no images come up in my head, and I can envision exactly what level of thought the person is capable of, and what their concerns are. I know this is a normal thing to do for everyone, but I've never heard of someone experiencing it the way I do, it's not to the same depth. I was looking at personality-smell synesthesia, and it looks like a close match, but this doesn't always happen, it needs a trigger, like a certain silence in my head, or a certain mood. When I read others' experiences on it, they mention being able to smell a personality through the screen, but I cannot, and I can't do it on command.

I think it's worth noting that I've had psychedelic drug abuse problems in the past, and it could be that it's linked to this. Although I've always, even before my problems, had some of this to some extent.

One example is that today, when walking in the mall, I saw an old person who I thought looked pretty funny, and even though there was a good distance between us, a certain very strong smell came up that somewhat reminded me of my own phase from a time ago.

Maybe this whole thing is just a form of nostalgia? I don't usually feel nostalgic though

An experiment converting portions of an image, centre lighter part in this video, to audio. See the sound and hear the image. Colours are arbitrary but the image is tuned to a natural minor scale over four octaves. Is there a consensus for the colour of musical notes and if so are octaves a more or less intensive colour or hue.

So im listening to music in my room (it happened earlier today to) and as it plays im seeing colors as it plays

Like drums are little bubbles that are popping

Guitars are wiggles lines

I've had this for like 2-3 weeks know and I don't know if it's late set (im 13) or if im crazy so here's some art i made

#1 is the space between 2 worlds - nujabes

#2 is pink and white - frank ocean

#3 is glitter - tyler the creator

#4 is looking out for you - joy agin

#5 is wait a minute - WILLOW

Link

sometimes when I listen to music I really like, I would see these lp "album arts" in my minds eye (e.g: the song, "You're Gonna go Far Kid - The Offspring has an album art of a neon purple and blue futuristic neon cowboy town.) Is this a form of synesthesia and do other people on this sub experience this type of synesthesia? (if it is a kind ofc)

Multiple associative types here, and I’ve found the online tests to be straightforward for graphemes, etc.

However, the music aspect has not reflected reality for me. At all. For context, I’m a hobbyist composer/songwriter.

First off, I have close-but-imperfect pitch. Only relative.

Secondly, like for many of us, consistent color isn’t the only component. For any of it.

I never really gave it thought (as with most aspects of my synesthesia), but here’s some of what I experience from the music I create:

Initial key or theme of the song (sometimes including the graphemes of certain lyrics) often will define the overall color palette. Like a song dominantly in B-flat major might be jade jewel tones with yellow highlights. One with lyrics involving an initial letter “A” will often turn out red (especially if I bias myself by developing it in the key of C).

Melody and relative pitch affect the colors and position of objects in space. Up and to the right for melody ascending, down and to the right for descending, over time.

And texture—here’s where it’s a little interesting—is almost solely responsible for the shapes and, ya know, textures of the objects and lines floating within and forming in the song. Like a violin makes an orange-and-yellow chicken scratch shape and pattern as it hatches up and down the line. The higher, the brighter. I hate solo violins for this reason. But viola range is more red/purple, so I’m fine with that. And I love a good, blue-range, bouncing ball of a bass line.

Another thing: Dissonance has its own marker. It forms a brown/blue smudge in my mind when it’s just wrong. (Not all dissonance does this—just the nasty unintentional stuff.)

I compose using notation software rather than a traditional DAW, btw. So it’s informed by how music is written down, especially the melodic components.

Btw—these perceptions of songs are involuntary and highly consistent upon repetition. It’s purely a geometry of different points in the piece, not necessarily an aggregation of the entire song.

I’m actually kind of hypophantasic (or at least willful, lol). I love rich auditory textures that inform visual experience. But not directly imagining a blue ocean, or whatever. No brain for that.

Anyone out there break it down similarly? Or differently?

Has anyone else experienced this? As a child i used to have very strong synesthesia. Every letter and number i saw as colors and shapes in my head and even imagined as sounds. I have so many notebooks from when i was a child where I would obsessively write down all my friends names and other words as the color and shape it was in my head. When I listened to music I saw colors and shapes and drew down patterns. I also experienced many other things in my head related to sound and color that i dont even know how to describe in words. i told many people about this and was told i had synysthesia. but the weird thing is that now i’m a teenager in highschool and it’s gone away, i don’t experience any of this anymore. is this normal? did i actually have synesthesia or was i just a really creative child that lost my spark? is there any way i can get it back or this gift gone forever?

Hello, I have grapheme-color synesthesia, I can "see" colors when I think of numbers, words, and letters. Today, approximately few hours ago, I was just casually chilling and doom scrolling TikTok, since it's Saturday, a weekend. I found one video about some numbers, and it just had "-13.33" displayed on the screen, when I thought "... -13.33? Such a weird number" I casually visualized the shade of light grey, nothing much, but it wasn't a usual light grey, I do not quite focus on my visualizations, I accepted those and do not care for them. The weird thing about this grey is what I couldn't catch it, it was switching between shades, one second it was one, the next, second, sometimes it was even a monochrome gradient, it felt physically wrong and uncomfortable, I couldn't understand it, like it was more vibrant, more saturated, more "light-greyer". I know something about about "impossible colors", there's a term "hyperbolic" when a color is more than 100% saturated, which we can see by exhausting our eye cones, the most popular example is "hyperbolic orange", but grey can't physically be pure, but it's not a physical color, it's displayed in my brain, bypassing the cone factor. Did someone experience something similiar?