The Null Device

Someone named Claire Mills has created a magazine for synæsthetes. Named "Syn", it consists of 48 pages of personal accounts, commentary and theories about the condition. It's only available as a bunch of graphic files on the web though, which is a tad inconvenient to browse.

(via Mind Hacks) ¶ culture psychology synaesthesia zines 0

A new system allows the blind to see with sound. The vOICe system consists of a headset with a camera and headphones, which translates images into "highly complex soundscapes", which are then played over the headphones. I wonder what it sounds like, and how long until the sound-art scene latches onto this and shops like Synæsthesia start stocking CDs of 18-minute glacial noise sculptures which actually resolve to images when heard by an appropriately trained listener. (via FmH)

(Actually, I wonder how long until some troublemaker releases a double CD of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster converted into vOICe soundscapes, just in the interest of testing the boundaries of art and copyright violation?)

¶ blindness prosthesis synaesthesia 0

An article about synaesthesia, and in particular, the tendency to associate colours with letters. The article gives a table of letters and their colours; are they more or less universal, or specific to one particular case?

I suspect that synaesthesia isn't all that exotic, and most people experience mild forms of it. I for one remember associating letters with colours when I was younger, though the colours were different (A,E and M were red, B was green, C and G were orange-yellow, and H was either red or blue). Some years later, I developed the theory that the mapping came from a set of alphabet blocks I played with when I was an infant.

¶ mind psychology synaesthesia 3

Jane Mackay, former GP and currently artist-in-residence for the Cambridge University Musical Society, has synæsthesia; a neurological condition which enables her to see the colours of sounds. She describes this experience in her own words.

"And my sister and I used to argue about our colours for the days of the week - my Wednesday is a lemony-yellow with angles in the middle of it, hers is green.

"Brian Perkins, the BBC Radio Four newsreader, has an amazingly rich, chocolatey-brown voice. "Yet 'Perkins' is a rather wishy-washy yellow-green, so I always forget his surname."

"I had a wonderful sneeze once, from someone sitting behind me in a concert. It was a really lovely turquoise that came across my shoulder in a triangular sheet."

(I once mentally associated letters of the alphabet with colours (A, E and M were red, B and F were green and C was yellow), though I think that originated in a set of wooden blocks I had as an infant.)

¶ psychology synaesthesia 0