Blogpost3: Musically inclined

    

How does synesthesia help me with my musical abilities? This question came to my mind when I started to do research on this topic. I wanted to find out how and when does it occur while I was listening to a particular song, and while playing with my band. When I listen to songs, I always look at the instrumental first and then at the lyrics. Later that I realized, there are more interesting things written in the lyrics than looking at the instruments. I'm not that good in doing vocals, but I tend to look at the lyrics of a particular song that caught my ears to listening to it. 

Music is very broad, you will never get to do it without the feeling of the beat of your heart with. What I learned in being a drummer for almost six years is that, you'll never learn how to play the drumset unless you feel it with the beat of your heart. Synesthesia comes in when your alone playing the instrument, or while in a band gig.

The part of synesthesia in here however, gives a vision and creativeness for the whole band. Synesthesia helps everyone in the band, especially the vocalist, because he is the one who will sing the composed song, and most of it is his original.

According to the article written by Maria Popova, entitled "Synesthesia Spotlight: 3 Visualizations of Music", Synesthesia is a rare neurological condition that leads stimulation in one sensory pathway to trigger an experience in another. Basically, a short-circuiting in the brain that enables such strange phenomena like perceiving letters and numbers as inherently colored (color-graphemic synesthesia) or hearing sounds in response to visual motion. 
While reading this, I asked my mom, "How do we visualize this? Does it just come into our minds, or do we see it literally through our eyes?". She said, we can use both, in our minds, or through our eyes, its just the same.

A person with music synesthesia is technically a Sound-to-Color synesthesia. When sound triggers the visualization of colored, generic shapes, sound-to-color synesthesia is at play. For  certain people, the stimuli are limited, and only a few types of sounds will trigger a different kind of perception. However, there are cases wherein many different sounds trigger color visualizations. Usually, the perceived colors appear in generic shapes – squares, circles, images, or perhaps an imagination of a building.

“Architecture is crystallized music.” –Goethe

I agree with this statement, because in music there is passion, imagination and creativity for new and different things to come. According to Michal Levy, this is the picture that came to his mind while listening to jazz music. The picture being shown are colored bricks and lines constructing a colorful and beautiful building. The title of that is the "Giant Step", a video of it was played at the site of the article at brainpickings.org. 

To this blog, all I can say is that, to having a music synesthesia is a privilege for me, because I could use it to gain more imagination on composing songs and the creativity of expressing it to a lot of people. The music synesthesia is one of the positive outcome of being synesthetic, although there are negative sides of, its up to you to find your way of controlling it, and train in it.