Synesthesia and Cymatics

Synesthesia has always been fascinating to me.  In fact, my younger brother, a student at the University of Chicago, is actually trying to publish his first fictional novel which centers on a synesthetic victim of neurological trauma.  The creative implications of the synesthetic condition are quite interesting and open-ended.  Pertaining to the Wikipedia article, I found the concept of the "color organ" to be very intriguing.  Not only does it seem like a way to understand synesthesia better, but it also seems like it would be very useful in teaching people to play an instrument.  Instead of reading sheet music, you could simply assign colors to chords and play a horizontally oriented painting.  I might try that sometime.  This idea is similar to the binary composition of Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer, in which the filmmaker alternates white noise and silence to a series of strobing white frames and black frames (we saw this in History of the Avant-garde with Dr. Kase).  The resulting viewing experience led me to begin to associate white noise with the white frames, since there was a clear rhythmic and visual association.

As for cymatics, this is utterly fascinating to me.  This sort of cross-referencing between seeing and hearing seems like it is a very promising area of research in terms of understanding more about human perception of sound.  Particularly, the relationship between sound and the visual image could be aided by cymatics.  We discussed this fairly extensively in Dr. Laudadio's Writing About Sound class, and I did my final senior seminar research paper (for my English major) on some psychological affectations of sound on basic moving images.

On a side note, below is a link to a video of some people engaging in a sort of cymatic-like experiment.  I found this a while ago because I like the band that one of these guys is in (they also run a company called Robot Repair which makes music for famous commercials).  But, when I found this, it made me happy to see they were artists too, not just commercial musicians.

http://robotrepairprojects.com/windmills.html