Four lexical gustatory examples

For anyone new to this blog or who doesn't know, I have two mild forms of synesthesia: sound color (I see colors when I hear certain sounds, notes or songs) and lexical gustatory (tasting certain things, or craving tastes, when I hear certain sounds or words) - I'm going to abbreviate this LG for now. The latter is much more fun, but as I said, they're both mild and don't surface that often. Well! Yesterday, I discovered a new LG synesthesia cue for me: the word "stickers" makes me taste and/or crave gummy candy. Neither the pearly kind nor the sour kind - the classic, transparent/jelly kind. I excitedly tweeted this, got into a mini conversation with Mikey Il about it, and then realized that sharing four of my lexical gustatory cues with you guys might be fun.

Media channel is celery. This one came up between 2 and 5 years ago. I'm thinking it was when I was still at Naked NY, since the nature of our work had us talking about media channels all the time. This is a very refreshing, crunchy pair of words for me.

Stickers is gummy candy. I have of course heard the word before, but for some reason when I read it out loud from an email yesterday, I flung up in my seat, ran to the kitchen, and ate a bunch of gummy Vitamin Cs and ginger chews. Every time I've uttered or heard the word since (I've been saying it a lot), I have the same sensation, taste, or craving.

Check is Doritos. Well, sort of. This one is fairly old, and I first remember it happening in middle school some time. It's not only the word check, but most words with a hard "ch" sound, and an "E" somewhere in the word. But the E has to be pronounceable. It can either be a short E, like in checkers, check, or Chester, or a long E, like in cheese, cheat, or cheek. Soft "ch" words don't count ("chenille" doesn't do anything for me in an LG way, for example, other than picturing a pile of cooked, blue-tinted glass noodles, but I'm not sure what that means either!? That literally just happened.).

Couch is my first LG cue ever, when I was about five years old. It happened while listening to a Teddy Ruxpin tape. There was one story where he and Grubby, and maybe some other characters were exploring the inside of a couch, and it was this big adventure. Every time Teddy Ruxpin said couch, I got this desire to eat something. But I couldn't figure out what, for years and years. Almost 20 years later, on the way to White Plains for a client meeting, a team I was on stopped to pick up lunch. The second I bit into my first-ever potato empanada, I yelled out loud, "OH MY GOD, IT'S COUCH!" I didn't realize this was due to a form of synesthesia yet, so it was a little awkward explaining what the hell I meant by my outburst.

Fun? Should I do more of these? Do any of you guys have any forms of synesthesia? Please tell me. I've never met or spoken to one before.

Some music about rhubarb.

I've been making mixes for a few years now, but this is the first one I put together with the intent of sharing with a bigger set of people. Also, usually I make one to immortalize a big-deal-something – there is one for the trip I took to Japan in 2008, for example. This one had a much more desultory inspiration: rhubarb.



I went to Seattle twice over the past month. Each time, I could not pick up a single menu without seeing rhubarb featured as an ingredient somewhere. I ate rhubarb preserves on steel cut oats, rhubarb compote on doughnuts, rhubarb juice/extract in a cocktail... you get the idea. It was so strange to me that I asked a server if it was in season, or if Seattle was just particularly nuts about rhubarb. It was mostly the former, coupled with the fact that rhubarb is grown locally in that area.

Tokyohanna - Rhubarb XXVIII1 by tokyohanna

So there you have it. I got a very strong set of audio associations to mirror the different forms all of this rhubarb took, and it turned into 32 minutes of music that matches the taste perfectly in my head. There's a bit of a tart kick, a drowning syrupy layer, and something else that I can only describe as feeling like the end of a very long dress train. Enjoy!

Synesthesia

This one will be short and lovely, guys. Not lovely on my part, but lovely on Terri Timely's part. They have put together a little video called Synesthesia; by the time three of my friends had sent me the link, I knew there must be a great reason for checking it out. This gem has been making its way around the web, and for good reason. See what I mean:

Synesthesia from Terri Timely on Vimeo.

The most delightful thing I have seen in a long, long time. I loved watching the kid sticking his headphone jack into different foods – especially the octopus tentacle and the turnip. And the mom slicing up the words for dinner? Brilliant. Just fantastic. I also personally love that synesthesia is getting a bit of attention now, as well ^_^

Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did!

Color turning into sound turning into color

I was of course excited to get an e-mail from the lovely Dylan Trees with the subject "Synaesthese-tastic" last month. The article he pointed me towards was fascinating; it tells the story of an artist/musician whose life was changed by a cybernetics expert he met in art school. Cybernetics, Wikipedia says,

...is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of complex systems, especially communication processes, control mechanisms and feedback principles. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory.

For this to start making sense: I should point out that the artist, Neil Harbisson, has achromatopsia – complete congenital colour blindness (he sees the entire world in black and white).

Upon a visit to Harbisson's art school, Adam Montandon (the cybernetics expert) heard about his condition and decided to work on helping Harbisson be able to paint in color (all of his work up to this time had been in black and white). He developed a machine called an Eyeborg that converts colors into sounds. When Eyeborg's mechanics are explained, it makes sense, but at first I had no clue how a device like this could even work. Well, different colors reflect light at different frequencies, right? This is how the thing looks:


When Harbison looks at a color through the lens, the sound frequency of the color is calculated and fed back to him as a specific noise that corresponds with that color's light reflection frequency. After a buffer period of learning which sound correspond to which color, Harbison is able to paint in the colors that the Eyeborg is "seeing." Pretty awesome, yeah?


He has an exhibit of city street scenes approaching in London; he's also working on the coolest-sounding project ever:

representing each capital city in Europe as a square made up of two triangles of different colours. In Monaco, it was azure and salmon pink; in Bratislava it was yellow and turquoise; and in Andorra it was dark green and fuchsia.

I would love to see that. Pretty awesome technology and concepts. One of the comments on this article presented a good idea to go along with it: "It would be very interesting to hear the sounds that he heard while viewing the individual paintings. Something the gallery should organise, perhaps." What if those ridiculous telephone-looking things that people walk around museums with actually played the sounds as one walked by each painting, as opposed to telling the story behind it (which could be reserved for the introductory plaque at the beginning of the exhibit)?

EDIT | Something amazing happened. Montandon (the creator of this amazing technology) commented on this entry, leaving a link to more information on his blog. Thanks Adam! I look forward to reading more.

sense blending

The phrase "sense blending" popped into my head Sunday night, right after I had a mini state schema solely involving the Science of Sleep trailer. When I saw the movie, I was slightly disappointed and didn't think I liked it much, because it was different from how I thought it would be, based on this trailer. It violated my expectations, pretty much. As more time went by, however, I thought about it over and over again and grew to adore the movie for what it actually is. Anyway, I was in the mood to watch the trailer (the video store was closed, it was late at night). I had completely forgotten what happens at 1 min. 37 sec. of this thing. So, up to this point, there are all these visuals and sounds and narration and a bit of a story. It all mixes together perfectly, like the delicious red velvet cakes my roommate makes sometimes. At one minute and thirty seven seconds, a song called Your Heart Is An Empty Room comes on. It's one of those songs that makes you feel like you are completely immersed in a swimming pool, the song being the water. You are in the center of it. It is the absolute perfect song for that precise second in the trailer... in the universe. I am sure of it. So I had a state schema. I thought about why, and then realized that it was sense blending. A tiny bit synaesthetic, since the music sounded like the iridescent waves, the narration feels like the main chracter waking up with his feet in the icebox, etc.

This is not my point though, and I just wanted to share the state schema with everyone because I had been missing them (my last one was in March). Then I saw an interesting-looking link on the side frame of YouTube, and was brought to one of the coolest videos I have ever seen.

Do you guys remember Spin Art? It was a machine that you would put a piece of thick paper into, and it would spin really fast. Then you would squirt different colored paints on it and you would end up with something like this:


I played with this thing a lot as a kid. Anyway, Michel Gondry had the idea to use a turntable for this and attach a camera to the top that spun at the same rate, so you could see what the paint looked like AS it was squirted onto the paper (instead of just seeing a blur). That's not even the best part. The whole machine was powered by little electrodes that were connected to Björk's fingers as she played the piano.



Can you think of a better experiment between those two? Watch the video - maybe you'll have a sense-blended state schema.

state schemas

Sometimes this wonderful transcendental thing happens to me. I wrote about one of those instances here. They don't last for too very long, but the happiness I feel in these moments is so concentrated and specific, that I wanted to think about it more and hear other people's stories. I am calling them state schemas.

Let me rewind a little. I loved the concept of schemas so much throughout my study of Psychology that I use the term all the time, forgetting that it's not a widely-used word. Schemata (when we're talking about Psych) are a thing our brain does; a method of organizing information and our knowledge into little packages that help us remember things and interact with the world. Stereotypes are the best example I can think of, even though they are not always used in a positive way : a collection of ideas, thoughts, phrases, sounds, visuals, etc. of a certain type of person. It's one big idea that holds many little ideas together and makes sense as a whole.

A state schema is an occurence. It is a moment in which everything is in alignment - the sights, the smells, the temperature, the lighting, the music, what you're thinking about, where exactly you are, and so on and so forth. Everything fits together in that moment; it's almost like feeling you're in a movie because everything seems to fit together perfectly. Like a successful Tetris game. This seems a little synaesthetic to me, since each element blends into the next.

Now, read this entry again, if you like, and see the elements of what made it wonderful to me. I wrote about it being 8.00am. It was sunny. It was 30-something degrees. The smell was clear. The pace at which I was walking made the sunlight come through the fence to the exact beat of the song I was listening to. It wasn't about the sun, the smell or the song - it was about that stuff working together as a whole to create one instance. State schemas are one of my favorite things in the world, and I cannot predict when they will happen; they just hit me like a delightful little surprise in the middle of my days.

Am I alone here? Does this happen to anyone else?