Seeing sounds. What?

Sound familliar? Well, I thought Pharrell Williams did see sounds when he made an album with this title. Betcha he just wanted attention. Or he just figured it would be a very interesting subject to work on. Hey, music is not your college theses. Well, do you think he went to college? Anyway, what does seeing sounds mean to you and why should you care when you don't know the meaning of the famous E=mc2?

Let me educate your fiddle, Jonas Brothers-filled brain. The modern world is heavily involved with media and all that shit, but I'm not entirely saying you should end up being a nerd wank all the time to your books. This is not a nerd subject. It's something an unusual and exciting perspective about people. Mind you, not a lot of people know about this, but it's on Wiki so wiki it up, man. But if don't want to do so, then lemme provide you a stripped version.

It's a human condition called synaethesia, whereas two senses overlap each other. So while you're listening to music, you just hear it, but for synaesthetes (people with synaesthesia) they see waves of colours with it. They said the colours had their corresponding notes, high ones dark, and vice versa. Even any ordinary sound (i.e. people talking) produce color. Ain't it nice? You see something special normal people don't, and you get to keep it for yourself. Synesthetes even say it's comparable to the so-called sixth sense - somehow they feel like they're extra special. Well, they are. A little uncomfortable maybe, but worth it. One out of 20,000 people have this condition. So you're extra lucky if you're one of them.

How'd they know? They discover it if they ever tell their experiences. A synesthete will most of the time find out that he senses things differently when he somebody tells him it's not normal, 'cause they assume everybody experiences the same way.

And that's just the one kind of synaesthesia. There are more others.

People seeing letters in colour. This one is called grapheme-color synaesthesia.

i.e.

1. Most people see letters in different colors, although they are not always the same color. S may register a dark green colour for one synnie, but for another S is blue.

2. Words register different colours, not like the ones with the letters.

3. A synnie once said when reading, words were coloured within five words and wrong-spelled ones have a different colour letter.

Numbers also have colours.

Visual motion-sound synesthesia.

Here's a test.

Video info. "Do you hear anything when viewing the moving dots? Play the movie repeatedly for best effect.Some people hear sounds when seeing this movie (and also when seeing other examples of moving or flashing objects). The sounds are simple such as whooshing or bubbling, and non-linguistic. The sound perception occurs automatically, not requiring effort or imagination."

So that's pretty much it. People's comments on this video were varied, but most of them reported breathing. Their authenticity, well, that's kinda hard to prove.

Other synaesthetic experiences are lexical-gustatory - hearing words and tasting them; you say candy and I lick 'em. (What a term, right? Lexical? Nonsensical. Makes my brain bleed.) number form; (mental map of numbers) and personification, or something like that. Who ever heard that "the letter U is a souless sort of thing"? Kinda neat, huh? But, what the hell, I ain't gonna delve more, I've become a walking article. I ain't an expert on this, so go research if you're interested. Busy yourself, but not about Joe Jonas' fave hangouts.

You might assume it's a pretty cool fictional experience of an idle and bored mind, but there are case studies about these, and identified synaesthetes are quite a number nowadays. I'd really like to say I have friggin' synaesthesia but it's hard to keep a big lie to look a lot cooler, It's so difficult to fake it 'cause you have to be consistent, and re-tests are usually done after a couple of years. It's worth checking out, you might know someone who's this special.

As for me, I'd be sitting here wishing I was kickass. And drop-dead interesting.

Rimsky-Korsakov was a synnie. Hell, he wrote "The Flight of the Bumblebee".

Links:

http://www.synesthesia.info/

Or Google it yourself.