Experience synesthesia: Google tool lets you 'hear' colors and shapes

As a musician and artist who experiences mild synesthesia, this is throwing me off. I don&#x27;t associate the colors illustrated in the example with the sounds I&#x27;m hearing.<p>I don&#x27;t have anything other than personal experience to back this up, but I would be surprised if it&#x27;s not a completely subjective experience—one person&#x27;s synesthesia probably doesn&#x27;t match another person&#x27;s, per se.<p>Just curious for any musician&#x27;s out there, when you&#x27;re playing in the key of D dorian, for example, what colors go through your mind? F major? E minor?<p>All these have specific colors that tend to dominate my imagination.

It&#x27;s totally over my head. The final screen needs a button for &quot;don&#x27;t get it&quot; or &quot;annoyed at the pretentiousness&quot;.

There was always a bit of cynicism and criticism on Hacker News, but lately it is at a completely different level. Almost every comment on every submission is negative, if not of the work itself then of some tenuous political implication, and usually not a very original or interesting one. Overall the attitude of valuing progress and working towards invention is completely gone, replaced with the dominant cynical, pessimistic and conservative tone of academia and legacy media.

synaesthesia is such a cool thing to experience. I am <i>blind</i> and still synaesthetic. It all started out with me realizing as a child that every digit (I later found out it works for small numbers as well) has a dedicated colour. Helped me a lot learning to deal with numbers in my head. I (as most synaesthetics do) originally thought this is the way it works for everyone. Took a while until I figured out that you&#x27;re being treated weirdly if you mention numbers and words having colours.<p>With music, I tend to get a carpet of all sorts of visual effects. I cant even begin to name specific colours or patterns. It is not very defined, as most of my visualisations are these days. Edges tend to blur from year to year once you finally lost your sight completely. But the myriad of colour and shapes is still there.

While I don&#x27;t experience synesthesia, colors and places resonate emotion, both good and bad, to the point where I don&#x27;t go certain places. I cannot stand being in large conurbations or in heavy traffic. It&#x27;s emotionally draining. Moreover, I cannot deal with hot, sunny days. I find them somewhat disturbing, and always get excited when there is overcast and&#x2F;or rain for days on end. Trying to get my partner to see the benefits of the PNW over Texas is not working very well.<p>Editing to say that people who prefer overcast&#x2F;rain are pluviophiles. Nothing better to me than a misty day. I find this delightful to relax or nap with:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3gCiCxLkXOk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3gCiCxLkXOk</a>

I often &quot;see&quot; and get the feeling of motion from music, but it is way more abstract than this. Those videos showing a moving shape or character in time with a baseline, or percussion are familiar to me, in this sense, if that helps to understand what I am trying to convey.<p>Smells will also invoke shapes, and maybe odd colors when they are very strong.<p>I get the impression this work was done by someone who has not experienced synesthesia. Or perhaps a very different kind.<p>Smells and sounds triggered other impressions for me as a kid. For a long while, it grew more dormant. Muted.<p>An acid trip with musicians one weekend in my early 20&#x27;s brought most of it back. And the experiences have endured since then.<p>Almost seems like my mind was congealing in some basic way, interrupted by the trip. Epic trip, BTW. Great people, trust and all the basics were there and experiencing music with those people under such an influence was amazing. I treasure that weekend. Have never seen reason to repeat it.<p>Down deep, I know that was one of those, &quot;all things in moderation&quot; tests. I plan on passing. And am glad I had the experience.

I have mild-strong synesthesia and it&#x27;s fascinating to see how someone else sees sounds - and also how physically uncomfortable it made me.

Is this super laggy for anyone else in FireFox?

Is this really synesthesia or just association? Blue is water sounds, yellow is brass instrument, red is slow groove?

I think I got my synaesthesia on more from playing Rez (also inspired by Kandinsky) than from this.

So: if you mention ‘machine gimmick’—errrr, ‘learning’—enough times then you get to reinterpret Kandinsky with an orchestra on Google&#x27;s time.<p>So from now on I&#x27;m waiting for a new Therion: with machine learning, a band, an orchestra and two choirs. Let&#x27;s put the advertising money to good use.

Transforming colors or shapes into sounds is trivial, and there are an infinite numbers of ways to do it (e.g. for each RGB value assign a tone, or set of tones, and bam! there ya go.) So it&#x27;s not like that by itself this project very interesting. Or maybe I&#x27;m missing something?

Just me or it doesn’t work in Firefox for iOS? I hear no sound at all.

Makes me miss flash.