Synesthesia and Cymatics

The first thing I think of when I hear the word synesthesia is Harry Smith, the abstract experimental filmmaker.  The use of Synesthesia was a known technique for him to use.   He visually represented any music notes that he heard being played and painted them.  I think it is really cool how concepts such as hearing a certain sound makes one think of a certain color. From personal experience, I know that when I listen to a song, a whole variety of colors fly through my head.  It’s really fun to watch as a kind of kaleidoscope moves through my head.  And since I have an obsession with colors, this is not surprising.  It is interesting how one will associate different colors with different sounds weather those sounds be voices, music, or any type of other sound that is a part of the world today.  I used to love it when I listened to music on an older computer.  When any song would play, a stream of colors would develop and form to the rhythm of any song that was played.  I can’t remember what you had to play the song in, but I want to say it was some type of version of Windows Media Player.  The colors would stream slower if the song’s tempo was slower and would be faster when the rhythm of the song was quicker. 

It is really fascinating about how sound can even be visible by just colors let alone having some type of formed shape.   Knowing that a sound can make a unique shape depending on how loud the sound is is mind blowing.  The shape of a ringing sound expands whenever the frequencies of the sound are higher.  If it is lower the shape of the sound becomes less complex and reduces the size of its shape. It is interesting to know that this type of art is helpful to studying science.   It is amazing to know that this concept of Cymatics is helping scientists study the sound frequencies that dolphins make.  Having this information will better allow them to study a dolphin’s language.  This has been something unique to many human beings for quite a long time.  The ways in which one can study sound is pretty cool.  People are coming up with many ways to associate concepts you would not think could be brought together in real life such as a sound being visible to the human eye.