Synesthesia, Cymatics, and Different Ways of Knowing

Synesthesia is fascinating. According to the Wikipedia article it creates a crossing between senses, such as seeing numbers and letters as colors. This is known as grapheme-color synesthesia. Synesthesia can deal with any kind of combination of senses, though.

In Even Grant’s Ted Talk, he talked a bit about making sound visible through cymatics. This in itself was intriguing to me because I’ve always loved audio visualizers. Seeing sound interests me. I related the work of cymatics to be almost like creating a physical representation of what synesthesia might be like. It creates a way for people who don’t have synesthesia to maybe get a vague sense of what it might be like for someone who does have it. Another thing to be explored is the relation of sound to matter.One of my favorite stories that Great Big Story did was on the cloud piano. It’s a device that takes pictures of clouds as they pass overhead and a program interprets the sounds to play the piano. This creates a soundtrack of the sky, as one might say. You can view the video here: Cloud Piano | That's Amazing

Grant even implores the audience to think about how sound might have related to the formation of the universe and its shapes. That’s an interesting point to me because when listening to recordings from space, there strange underlying noises. Saturn recordings are especially haunting. Here is an example of recordings from Saturn: Sounds of Saturn Rings - NASA Voyager Recording (HQ/HD)

Daniel Tammet brought it all together in his Ted Talk. He spoke of how he experiences synesthesia and tried to bring that to the viewers. I quite enjoyed the section where he talked about how he saw numbers. Beyond that, however, his analysis of language was interesting. I liked how he explained why statistically most people thought that the Icelandic word was sad. It’s something I do believe should be explored a little more - how words can evoke certain feelings just from their sound.