Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
- Amber Andersen and Peter Wiarda use synesthesia in their artistic expressions.
- Andersen paints music as visual art, while Wiarda captures city scenes photographically.
- Synesthesia links sensory experiences, enhancing creativity and problem-solving abilities, experts say.
SALT LAKE CITY — When she was a kid, Amber Andersen thought everybody experienced the world the way she did. But when she talked with her friends about music and said things like, "I love how pink the chorus looks in this song," or, "I love the texture that this verse makes right here," she got quizzical looks.
"I would talk to people about music in a visual way," she said.
"And there was a moment where I thought maybe something is wrong with me," she said.
And then, during a high school psychology class that she got a name and an explanation for what was going on.
"And I just remember feeling so validated," she said. "Oh, I'm not crazy. It's not in my head. Like, it is a real phenomenon that happens."
The explanation in a word: synesthesia.
In a small percentage of the population, senses are wired a little differently.
Andersen has one of the most common forms of this uncommon condition. She sees music and other sounds.
"Sometimes it can look like distinct shapes and patterns. Other times it can look like just light moving through fog or even like an aurora borealis," she said. "Both, like, in my mind and projected in the field in front of me."
The patterns, the shapes and the textures move and change.
"When I listen to a 3-minute song, it's also like watching a 3-minute movie, almost," she said.
Looking for a way to show family and friends what she sees, Andersen, who has no art background, tried rendering it with paint on canvas.
A moment of Taylor Swift's "Wildest Dreams" is a mottle of candy pink and orange with yellow streaks. Englebert Humperdinck's "A Man without Love" looks like serpentine banded ribbons of olive with a hint of red.
It turned out she had a knack for visual art and kept on painting music. (You can see her work on The Painted Playlist.)
David Brang, associate professor of psychology and the principal investigator of the Multisensory Perception Lab at the University of Michigan, says there seems to be a link between synesthesia and artistic ability.
"Synesthetes have increased visual imagery abilities," he said. He said that finding has been replicated in several studies.
He said they also tend to do better on tests of creative problem solving.
In the late 1980s, a researcher placed a newspaper advertisement looking for synesthetes, and a lot of artists responded, but Brang says it's hard to know if that was just because artists may have been more likely to respond to the ad.
Photographer Peter Wiarda didn't know he had synesthesia until he heard a Radiolab podcast about it. He doesn't see it in his vision, but in some other headspace, he has a hard time explaining.
He's tried approximating what he sees by photographing blurry neon lights at night.
"Let me try something," Wiarda said.
He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the Granary District, where we were conducting his interview.
The sound of car tires on a wet road, he said, looked white and spiky. The sound of a construction worker hammering appeared to him as red and orange cylinders.
Wiarda says he tends to avoid crowded, noisy places because he can be visually overstimulated.
"I take pictures of a lot of city scenes like this," he says, pointing to the empty buildings in this industrial-looking neighborhood.
Wiarda published a book, "Urban Calm," a collection of quiet urban landscapes like the scene around us.
"I actually try to pick out places that are empty and calming, just a sense of peace and tranquility and relaxation. It's just relaxing to me," he said.
"Maybe that's what makes it easier and more relaxing for me to compose my photography," he said.
There is no MRI test or CAT scan to diagnose synesthesia. Brang says there are some differences in the structure of the brains of synesthetes — differences in the density of gray matter, differences in connectivity — but he says they are broadly distributed across the brain and not in areas devoted to perception.
He says we know, though, that people like Amber Andersen aren't making up stories because they report associations that have been consistent for the last decades.
Anderson has another form of synesthesia that makes her see numbers and letters in specific colors.
"So (for example) 'A' will always be a specific color of red, not just the vague sense of red," Brang said.
"If you have them (synesthetes) try to match it with a color picker online, they'll be very stable in their pick in the colors that they choose across weeks, years, or even decades."
Synesthesia comes in dozens of varieties. Some people "taste" words. Some "feel" sounds.
Andersen "sees" time. She describes an abstract squiggly loop of different shapes and colors that appears around her when she thinks about the calendar.
"All of the days of the week, all of the months, like everything has a designated space in front of me," she said.
To those of us mere mortals who are not synesthetes, it may be hard to conceive what synesthesia really looks like, but Brang says we can get an inkling.
If you're in bed in the dark, waiting to fall asleep and you hear a door slam, you might see a flash of light. Fifty percent of people do.
Or there's the double flash illusion.
Amber Andersen, like most synesthetes, enjoys having the condition. She sees it as a gift, a "superpower."
"I always thought it was a very, very cool experience because to me, my synesthesia makes it feel like I'm at a live concert all the time," she said.
