Synaesthesia!

Warning: you don't really need to read this... it may only be fascinating to me!

Hey - I just found out that my composition prof also has synaesthesia!  She has a different kind than I do - a kind I wish I had - where music (sometimes sound/timbre/etc.) translates into colour (often moving colour).  Cool, eh?  I have "grapheme-colour" synaesthesia.  I didn't even realize it WAS anything until I went to art college and mentioned something during a discussion on colour about how every letter, number, month, day of the week, and name have an inherent colour in my head... thinking everyone would say, "Yeah, totally!"  But they didn't, and instead, one of the guys in my class came back the next day with an article on what he called "my condition".  Ha!

I can remember asking people all the time when I was little (especially on the bus, for some reason - probably boredom) which colours they saw for which letters/numbers/words etc... and the response was consistently, "I don't get what you mean!  Like, CHOOSE a colour?"  And I'd be like, "No!  Just the colour it IS!"  Josie Taylor would do it with me... she obviously has it too.  I miss Josie.  She was so cool and hilarious and a GENIUS.  And also a grapheme-colour synaesthete, I guess!  Little did we know!  Actually, she probably DID know - she's a genius.  Did I mention that?

When the guy in art class opened my eyes to this craziness, I started paying attention to what was going through my mind during the day.  I realized that every street I turn onto is a colour, and I base a mild like/dislike for streets (and other things) based on how I feel about the colour they "are".  My first impression of a person, I've discovered, has a great deal to do with the colour of their name (I don't want to tell you guys now which letters are distasteful to me - AAAH!).  It fades as I get to know them, and sometimes I can even gain a new appreciation for a letter/colour just because I like the person.  The first letter in a word USUALLY dominates, but sometimes even a grouping of letters can produce a certain effect.  Also, it depends on the strength of colour.  Vowels, other than A, are much more neutral/pastel to me, whereas consonants are quite bold.  In the article it said that this was common!  I'm not crazy!

Some grapheme synaesthetes would look at a word and see each individual letter as a colour (some have ways to "spell out" a rainbow, and they SEE it on the page, like, for me [red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple]: ADLETR or 24(ish)3758... but ADLETR and 243758 don't look like rainbows to me... ADLETR is red because of the dominant A, and 243758 is WAY harder to distinguish that way, though I do naturally feel the warm to cool progression from left to right).

You know what I also found out about some synaesthetes?  They tend to naturally personify things - even inanimate objects!  SOUND FAMILIAR?!?!?!  It's so fun to realize that this is a "thing" - not just random personality traits.  Synaesthetes are often creative, too.  And apparently it runs in families.  And APPARENTLY, about 1 in 23 people have synaesthesia of some sort!  So which of you have it?  There's my kind (of which I only have a mild form - some people would literally be reading this post and SEE all the colours as they go, whereas mine isn't seeing as much as knowing), a music-colour kind, a number kind (often very spatial), and even a TASTE kind, along with a "personifying" letters, numbers, etc. kind.  I guess the main thing is that your brain is over-hooked on associations?

My name is a deep purple because of the R.  Purple isn't my favourite colour, but I can't do anything to change the association!  It's interesting with the whole changing the spelling of my name from Rebecca to Rebekah... I think it's especially satisfying to me because now my name MATCHES within itself (the dominant K is a magenta which goes well with the deep purple, and the brown H makes it sophisticated).  Before I had a purple beginning and then a bunch of primary colours for the rest.  YUCK!  They yellow C's used to always take over.  I feel like the name change was going from cute to regal, you know?  And then "Bek" is totally different - the B and E are both shades of blue, so the K is completely overridden.  There isn't even a hint of purple in Bek, whereas Rebekah is completely purple, with the B and the vowels overridden.

BIZARRE!  I also think I must have a slight music/colour type, because I can't deny that every key has a colour to me.  But the way I know it's not quite the same as the grapheme thing, is that the musical key letters are different than just letters in the alphabet, and they always have been.  E, in music, is green.  E, in a word, is very light blue.  A, in music, is a reddish purple.  A, in the alphabet, is red.  C, in music, is red.  C, in the alphabet, is yellow.  G, in music, is light blue.  G, in the alphabet, is deep purple.  B flat is the only note that's black... where alphabet B is blue.  D is the same in both - light orange!  But the name "Dan" is totally green because of the N... I have no idea why it dominates, except that anything green tends to override everything else in my brain.  Fascinating.  But I don't have perfect pitch, so I don't think you could just play me a song in E and I'd see green.  So I don't know what my associations are all about there.  Usually it's just letters/numbers, but I can't account for why musical letters change colour!

Anyway, it's so cool that my prof has it.  I'm excited to talk to her about it.  It all came to light because I had to write that one pitch piece, and I chose E and called it Green because of the association.  I think I said that in the last blog.  Anyway, I know it's ridiculous, but... it's so fun meeting other people who know what I'm talking about.

Goodnight!