Life of a musician with synesthesia

Living with highly sensitive senses means that everything is experienced slightly stronger. On the one hand, the sensory input can be absolutely enchanting, even excruciatingly beautiful; but when it becomes too intense, the body’s defensive reaction to them can be sudden and harsh. But when your brain mixes and matches between the senses, however, this becomes an entirely new sensory roller coaster.

‘What do you mean?! Are you mad or what?!’, my boyfriend exclaimed, jumping up suddenly and staring at me in terror. A moment earlier, trying to keep a casual conversation going, I had asked him, ‘What colour is the letter M for you?’ I found his reaction confusing, but funny — I knew he liked to joke.

But he meant it in earnest.

This is how, at 15, I found out that I was synesthetic, and that not everyone else was. And that for many, the answer to any questions about what colour aura one might see a printed letter in are less often, ‘orange’, and rather oscillate around ‘what?!’ much more frequently than I might have expected. This surprising exchange sparked a novel consideration, one that overshadowed my worldview at the time. Having accidentally discovered that not everyone experiences sight stimuli as I do, I slowly started wondering how else my perception of reality differs — and moreover, how would I ever know if it does? Perceiving our surroundings is such a deeply personal thing, and yet we tend to take it for granted, perhaps lest we spiral into anxious detachment and unending doubts. We just have to trust something to hook us onto reality, and trusting our senses seems like a decent start.

How much does your reality change when you’re forced to question something fundamentally obvious? For me it didn’t really change much at first — I thought it’s rather funny. It was only after I tried discussing the anecdote with some friends that I realised how painstakingly difficult it is to try to explain my experience to someone who has never experienced it the same way. Their limited comprehension (despite their best intentions) slowly brought forth a realisation for me that those rich perceptive processes I enjoy through my senses simply are not available to most people.

Nonetheless, I can try and explain it here: my synesthesia is expressed by an immediate and intuitive recognising of letters and digits as if they were coloured. On the one hand, I am aware of the colour in which they truly appear in front of my eyes. For example, I can and do see that a text in a book has letters printed in the same shade of tint. My eyes see what is in front of them without distortion — the sensory input is correct. Yet simultaneously, that signal is interpreted in my brain as implying a specific colour that is directly bound to the shape of the given letter or digit. Somewhere on the way that output gains additional information, which is not contained within the original signal at the beginning of the transmission. What comes “in” through my eyes is not what my brain decodes, although it is also aware of the change happening in the process. As a result, I am aware that letters or digits are scribed in a certain colour, but my brain recognises them as if their actual colour has been interfered with by another colour — an aura, a halo? — which is bound to and implied by the shape of the letter or the digit. By the way, my eyes and their functioning have been checked by doctors and specialists from several medical institutes and research centres in different countries, and physically they are fine. I see what's on the page just right, but I “feel” it otherwise.

There is little clarity as to what precisely causes synesthesia, but research generally seems to imply that additional, even excessive neural connections between different regions of the brain are to blame. As far as I know, there is no unanimity amongst synesthetic persons in regard to their perceived colours — which makes sense, as ultimately it is each person’s brain that creates the extra dimension of connectedness within itself: there is no reason for any of that to apply more universally from person to person. This, however, made me realise that there are, in fact, certain rules or regularities within one individual person’s synesthetic realm that might be identified.

For me, this means that those letters and numbers that feature comparable geometric features also share the same colours, and those letters and numbers that look somewhat similar therefore fall into groups of similar colours. When tired, I notoriously mistype R and 4 for each other — these are perhaps the strongest coloured, bright red characters of all digits and alphabet combined. But B and 8 are the same colour, and so are E and 3, N and 7, 6 and b, 0 and O, I and 1. Interestingly, it has never been suspected that I might have dyslexia — I remember spellings and rarely misspell, and have never had any problem with handwriting or calculations. Moreover, I tend to readily notice typos in writing (which can be a little frustrating).

Those friends of mine who have known me long enough to have visited me in several of my various apartments have frequently observed that my bedrooms always look very similar, from one flat to the next. Yes, on the one hand, maintaining fixed positions and constellations for items of home equipment and furniture surely provides a feeling of stability and familiarity. However, it is the colours, or rather the persistent lack thereof, that is paramount for my well-being. Shades of white, beige, grey, and black, originating in my room, have by now dominated the rest of the house too. Of course, the Eastern-European late ‘90s aesthetic is to blame for my adult preference towards the visually minimalistic and plainly coloured, as is oft the case for the millennial demographic that grew up surrounded by a joyful clutter of colours and objects and even more clutter. Yet sensitivity to colour also means that you cannot rest if your attention is constantly stimulated by strong visual cues. The more plain-coloured my immediate environment is, the more calm, comfort, and regeneration it ensures.

At 24, my realisation that my visual synesthesia goes hand in hand with an excessive intensity arising from aural stimuli turned out to be a complete plot twist. Isn’t it ironic that as a professional musician, I am often unable to listen to music recordings on demand? Silence is my safe haven, a state of recharging, of comfort for processing music. Yes, the music is always in my head. It’s difficult to explain — I am definitely not thinking about music all the time, not as a subject: the experience is both much more passive and uncontrollable, as there is music forever playing as a soundtrack behind my thoughts. This bodily experience of music is very deep and overwhelming. It dictates my movements and breathing, the pace of my steps, often without me noticing.

This is not to say that I don’t ever enjoy music as a listener. Indeed, I really enjoy attending live concerts and giving them my full attention. Whilst engaging with daily activities, I often find myself drawn to a particular style of music or a specific recording. However, the moment of satiety might come very rapidly, and violently stop me from enjoying it any further. In the past, while listening to music, I would often end the activity by suddenly squatting and hiding my head in my shoulders, feeling unwell if my headphones didn’t come off my head quickly enough. A brutal ending, whether for a gentle baroque aria or a fun, uplifting pop song. Back then, I thought that I was just tired and didn’t think much of it. Today, I realise that I wasn’t totally wrong: now I just know to limit the intake of aural stimuli before reaching my sensory overwhelm. (Before my head gets tired, if you will.)

A while ago I discussed all this with my mom — and learned that I’m not the only one in the family who experiences reality like I do. Moreover, I learnt that my particular sensitivity to sound made itself apparent already very early in my life. I was only a few months old when my mom gave up breastfeeding, as it turned out that any sound was more interesting to me than this special moment of gentle bonding between mother and child. I would immediately turn around, wiggling to see where the sound was coming from and what it was whenever I heard something new: a person talk, someone walk by, a door creak. Whether I like it or not, music and sound always win.

I’d like to think it’s different now... and it is, but only to a degree. My brain still prioritises sound over many other activities. When I hear music, it instantly draws my attention. I can’t study or read when there’s music playing in the background. Noise exhausts me. I have found solace in a variety of sound-reducing earplugs (some that selectively mute low and high frequencies, so as to enable hearing speech and mid-range clearly, and some that mute all as much as possible) which I often wear in addition to over-the-ear headphones — adjusted for extra sound reduction or for playing some neutral soundscape, such as lake water and birds chirping. Fun fact — according to research compiled and summarised by Noa Kageyama, performance psychology lecturer at Juilliard, listening to birdsong can help improve wellbeing and reduce anxiety.

On the other hand, when I read music notation, I usually automatically hear in my head what the music sounds like. Sound stimuli can be very immersive, deep, and thrilling. Music can truly be exalting. The emotional and intellectual agitation conveyed by music performed live can truly be a submersive, cathartic experience.

And then there’s the other senses, too...but there’s not much there beyond the ordinary, to be honest. I am very opinionated about certain flavours (parsnip is the devil’s food). I’m always feeling too cold or too hot no matter how hard I try to achieve thermal comfort. I also take particular pleasure in smelling perfumes (insofar as my sinusitis lets me breath on a given day), and have only realised recently that most people don’t intuitively associate smells with colours as I do. All in all, the visual synesthesia and the aural sensitivity are perhaps most interesting.

Especially when they get combined.

As an early music performer I cherish the fact that I do not have perfect pitch; for those unfamiliar with the industry-specific technicalities, this allows me to play at different pitches without much trouble. (I read music in a certain tonality in the score, and I can play it on different instruments, no matter if each particular instrument sounds a little higher or lower than the others.) The fun begins when I recognise the pitch of the music I hear and can identify the tonality. The association between the tonality (expressed in letters) and my synesthesia (connecting letters with colours) causes me to hear the music in the colour of the letter of its tonality. A similar thing happens when I read paper music: having recognised the tonality based on the notation of the piece, I perceive it in a particular colour. Both when I read the score and when I imagine/hear the music in my head as a result of reading the notation, these both have a colour associated with them.

Interestingly, musical symbols also have colour associations, with the sharp looking similar to H, and the flat similar to b. As such, all tonalities with flats (whether in the name or in the clef indication) seem darker, more brown or muddy, just because of the presence of multiple ‘b’ symbols within the tonality or its name. On the other hand, tonalities with sharps seem more bright or vibrant, due to the strongly grass-green association of the letter H, the shape of which appears twice within the sharp.

As an early musician I regularly perform pieces in transposition, depending on the keyboard instruments available within a chamber music context — I often need to adjust to the other instruments that I play with, finding a common ground for us to all play together. For this, I generally prefer having paper music that is prepared in the target tonality. And yes — funnily enough, simply transposing a piece makes it feel to me as if it is an entirely new composition, simply because it now appears to me in a new colour. (No neighbouring tonalities have similar colours, which makes the popular transposition by a full step a rather radical change in the piece’s colour aura).

I’m not really sure that there is any way to conclude this, or anything to learn. Many friends have asked me over the years to describe what life with synesthesia looks like, and this is basically it (if only for me). My testimony, or at least, my attempt at explaining something to others that is for me fundamentally natural and intuitive.

One last fun fact about me is that I never really liked my name, because the letter W is dark and gloomy, it’s a muted softish and cool purple-brown.

And yet it turns out that, perhaps, it is one of the colours that best suits me in real life.