Syneesthesia In Music

In case you were wondering, what you just watched was a series of birds dancing to Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Galop", from his 1858 opera Orpheus in the Underworld. And no, there is nothing weird about birds dancing randomly.

But looking beyond the birds, the video tells us something clearly: we can visualize music in a lot of ways. Typically, the contents of audio files (songs or speech) are shown as waveforms in audio editing or player programs. Similarly, music follows its own language of notation, with higher pitches of sound placed on higher lines of the staff.

This time, look at the video below. While listening to Frédéric Chopin's Nocturne in Eb Major, Op. 9 No. 2 (1830), see how higher pitches are higher up in the screen and louder

The wiring is entangled such that information gets sent to the wrong places. As such, people end up having the ability to see smells or taste colors. It's a rare condition, but I do think that you're interested at how it might feel like (Simner et al., 2006).

It's a good thing, though, because we can do exactly just that. As the psychologist S. S. Stevens showed in the 1900s, people are actually good at reporting what they feel in one sensory system using units from another sense. This method of crossmodal perception allows us to adjust how bright lights are based on how loud a sound is (Spence, 2011). Now, you know why you turn down the music volume when you want to see better.

Charles Spence (2011) has presented that many crossmodal perception studies have been done in the past. For example, /a/ sounds are often linked to large things, while /e/ and /i/ refer to smaller objects. Smooth shapes also sound like /m/ and /l/, while pointy shapes sound like /t/ and /k/.

Referring to sounds, louder noises seem to be bigger. Higher pitches are smaller, lighter, pointier, brighter, and move upwards. But Shakila Shayan and coworkers (2011) point out two more things. First, pitches can also be thick or thin. And second, your culture can influence how you describe the pitch of

They asked Farsi (in Iran), Turkish (in Turkey), and Zapotec (in Mexico) speakers to describe a set of sounds presented to them. It turns out that for their participants, higher pitches are better described as being thin rather than high.

Interestingly, the same words used to describe pitch also apply to the loudness of the sound. Thus time though, louder sounds are thick and strong, while softer sounds are thin or