And yes, it tends to vary, with a stronger or weaker experience depending on a lot of factors like the strength or type of smell, how you’re feeling, how focused you are on what you’re smelling/seeing, hormonal issues, how your sense of smell is performing at that particular time, how relaxed you are. I can strongly identify with what you say about how you perceive the shapes and colours, as I have this type too. Yes, everything you say here fits in with olfactory-visual synesthesia. Hello, and thanks for telling me about your case! They don’t really tie in with any type of synaesthesia though. The song-person associations are quite fascinating. The word-image associations from your childhood (I love June being fish fingers by the way) would probably have stuck if they were synaesthesia, and there would have been a lot of them. Does your lilac song have lilac coloured album art by any chance? The album colours can be a problem though, and can actually cause confusion to synaesthetes too, if they have milder associations! I wonder if in the case of Splendora’s “Shirt On” you were actually influenced by the album art, as I’ve noticed it’s predominantly yellow and orange. You could even repeat the test several times if you're not sure. If you have this type of synaesthesia you would have very high consistency, about 90% or over. Then save that list of colour correspondences, don’t look at it again in a few weeks, or months, or however long it takes to be sure you’ll have forgotten what you wrote, and repeat the process, to see if your colours are consistent. Listen to all or part of each song and note down the colour it suggests. Make sure you use a system where you won’t be able to see the album art or other colour influences before, or as, you listen. I think it sounds like you don’t have it, but you could do this if you wanted to test it out: make a playlist of songs (the more the better). It is automatic, but while most would get their colour perception straight away, I’ve heard of others who it comes to gradually and not necessarily on the first listen of the song. People with song-to-colour synaesthesia have a very strong conviction about what colour each song is, they usually have it with all or most songs, the idea of any other colour being associated with a particular song is “wrong” and unpleasant, and the colours are very consistent, they wouldn’t change. The most interesting one is your song-to-colour associations. Reply Deleteįrom what you say I would be inclined to think that you don’t have synaesthesia, or that these are not examples of it at least, but you could certainly “test” yourself if you wanted to check. Most of the time I can't even tell if it's related to the voice or another characteristic of the person, it's just involuntary and frankly a bit annoying as it makes me cringe and tends to stop me from enjoying the song when it's someone I don't want to be thinking about. Is it possible that I just didn't notice I made associations between colour and music so easily until I learned about the existence of chromaesthesia? Does it still count as synaesthesia even though it has to be prompted?įor what it's worth, I also make associations with songs to people I know, based on different factors.Sometimes it's because of the person's voice having some kind of connection to the sound of the instrument used, for example, an old teacher of mine was associated with a particular violin song, and I was just trying to explain the reason there and I couldn't, I don't know why they're related other than their voice has something to do with it. Other times I'll initially say, for example, "it's a navy blue song", then immediately disagree with myself and decide that a dark, warm red fits the song much better, with no reason connected to the mood or the typical connotations of these colours, I just know if it doesn't fit. When I remember to make associations, however, I can say confidently that Splendora's "Shirt On" is an orange and yellow song, or that another song is a lilac song. The next thing I think could be synaesthesia is that it is very easy for me to associate songs with colours, however I'm not sure about this as it's something I have to prompt myself to do. I can't remember whether these associations were consistent, and they didn't stick as I don't make these associations anymore, but I wanted to put this in there anyway. I distinctly remember associating specific English words with images, such as "June" with a specific image of fish fingers being cooked or "weird" with a cartoon dog with black, fluffy fur. I moved to an English-speaking country when I was 4 years old, and had to learn English as a second language through immersion. I was hoping you could tell me whether any of the things I mention below are synaesthesia.
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