My Synesthisias, Part 2: Simple Percussive Sounds = Black & White Striped Patterns

More on synesthesia…! See yesterday’s entry if you missed it. =^)

I’ve been inspired to write in more detail about this since my weird vertigo incident after watching a 2-toned pickup truck drive by.

Also from Wiki article:

There are two overall forms of synesthesia:

• projective synesthesia: people who see actual colors, forms, or shapes when stimulated (the widely understood version of synesthesia).
• associative synesthesia: people who feel a very strong and involuntary connection between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers.

What I described in Part 1 were linked together and very much associative.

In addition:

1. Synesthesia is involuntary and automatic.
2. Synesthetic perceptions are spatially extended, meaning they often have a sense of “location.” For example, synesthetes speak of “looking at” or “going to” a particular place to attend to the experience.
3. Synesthetic percepts are consistent and generic (i.e. simple rather than pictorial).
4. Synesthesia is highly memorable.
5. Synesthesia is laden with affect (or emotional tonality.)

The most disruptive type of synesthesia for me is the next one I’m going to describe, and it is the projective form.

I wish I saw colors with sound, but I don’t. Nope– instead I have something I have yet to see described anywhere…

With sudden bursts of sound ONLY, I see a black and white striped pattern pop up as if on a screen right in front of my eyes/face.

It would take forever to try to recreate these complex patterns by hand, so I went to the internet and tried to find examples to share. I couldn’t get exact matches, and every sound is slightly different, but I tried to find patterns that were close enough that you get the basic idea, and you can see how they shift as the sound changes. The following are seen as a burst of hallucinatory vision that lasts for about a second in every case on this list. It is most easily seen in the dark or against a dark background, but I can still see a ghost of it even in most medium lights like lamps or cloudy days or at twilight. I think bright colors and light just make too much “noise” to see the patterns very well, but they still cause distortions to my visual field that interfere with my eyesight briefly.

1. LOUD DONK or WHACK (i.e. wood falling to a hard floor, or logs thrown into log pile, has higher pitch and hollow resonance to it…)

Note that it is framed in, rather than open at the edges. That usually means the sound had an abrupt end to it.

LOUD BANG or CRACK (i.e. car door slam, gun shots at a distance, so more sharp and deep than wood sounds)

Bangs are always jagged lines zipping down at a diagonal angle. Still framed in, because the slamming sound ends abruptly. That frame is consistant with all such sudden “start and stop” sounds.

LOUD WHUMP or KOONTZ (i.e. heavy book falling to the floor or bass beat at a dance club)

Notice there is no frame, because the sound fades a tiny bit rather than abruptly ending. A softer tone makes the jaggedness ease up a little and the stripes go more horizontal or vertical for some strange reason. Imagine being at a dance club in the semi-darkness with the pattern below popping up for every beat as lights flash and you feel it in your chest! Repeating beats make me naturally very HIGH because it trances me out, big-time. But I love it!

LOUD TWANG (i.e. metal sheet hitting cement or a tool dropped onto concrete)

Now shit gets more interesting! Metal percussion goes wavy/curly and bends inwards and outwards in the hallucinatory vision. I rather enjoy these patterns, but sound-wise they hurt the ears.

LOUD BOOM (i.e. fireworks explosion, a gun being shot fairly close by, or a transformer exploding)

This isn’t quite right… There are NEVER any CHECKS like this, so instead imagine the checks as stripes like the ones in the corners. Explosions of the deep and loud kind DO, however, bend back in on themselves and make very interesting patterns! Watching fireworks is extra cool because between flashes of color and light I see things like THIS when I hear the booms.

LOUD THUNDER close enough to hear CRACKLES (only for close up strikes)

You’ll notice that the pattern gets so complex it makes circles and dazzles your eyes to the point it hurts a little, right? Yeah… It’s almost like the rolling part of the thunder manifests as multiple patterns repeating into a coherent pattern on top of more patterns. Again, it only works with the kind of “Godsmack” thunder of major storms like I experienced in the Midwest. Multiple close strikes were so intense I went blind with seeing these patterns to the point I was feeling my way around with my hands (when I wasn’t covering my head with said hands.)

Patterns and sounds being matched is still relatively new to the research, although an exciting start has been made there. It’s opening up a whole area of brain research now that they can SEE where in the brain the “wires” get “crossed.”

Here’s another article (scroll down slightly to begin): www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(08)00796-3.pdf