Kelly McCormick, a cognitive psychology researcher at Emory University, says many scientists have begun to think of synesthetes as at the “extreme end” of a “spectrum” we all exist on. A growing body of research over the last 15 years suggests that all of us experience what is sometimes called "multi-sensory integration" or "cross-modal perception." When Singer looked into the phenomenon, she found out that the magic of cross-sensory connections may not be reserved for synesthetes alone. Kandinsky’s visual interpretations of music-he is believed by some to have had synesthesia-turned Singer onto the concept.
While studying music and mixed media arts at University of Sussex, she fell in love with the experimental methods of abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky and composer John Cage, and wondered how playful, full-body approaches to art might allow people to experience it more fully. But at school, she found her classical music education dry and rule-bound, more focused on technical perfection than on passion. Singer grew up in south east England in a musical family, learning cello from her mom and piano from her aunt. Some synesthetes say they see colors upon hearing musical notes, or get a taste in their mouths upon saying certain words, or “taste” shapes when they eat, or see black numbers in color. But Singer had a question: Could ordinary people be made to experience the magic, too?Ī still of a BitterSuite performance in London. Synesthesia is a provocative phenomenon, for both artists and neuroscientists. For those with synesthesia, who are estimated to number 4 percent of the population or less, “one sensory event leads to an automatic or involuntary experience in some other sensory modality,” says Tony Ro, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Singer’s concept is inspired by synesthesia, the oft-mythologized neurological condition in which people experiencing a crossing over of the senses. I want you to just feel this music.” Once the curators of this strange affair had eliminated that most dominant sense-sight-audience members were freed up to pay more attention to sound, scent, taste and physical sensation. “I want you to not think when you get inside this room. High passages are said to “soar” sad music is “blue.” This was a more literal attempt to help us experience music through multiple senses: music combined with the actual feeling of soaring, the sharpness of high notes, the sourness of discordant ones.īitterSuite, a British music, dance and experience company, is an effort to open “people up both imaginatively and also bodily,” says its creator, Steph Singer, a 27-year-old British immersive artist and composer. When we write about music, we often borrow from the realms of the other senses. As if the idea was to bring us inside the music itself.
And when it pressed in intensely, the dancers squeezed our shoulders and rocked our heads.Īt times, they held scents near our noses, and wafted a wind across us, and even pressed evocative morsels of food into our mouths-truffle cheese with pop rocks, fizzing as the music rose-as if our entire bodies could be recruited into feeling the mad sensuality of Debussy’s work. When the music was playful, they tickled our forearms. When the music soared, the dancers lifted our feet to mimic the sense of weightlessness. Then, as a chamber ensemble began to play Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, the dancers began to “play” the music on our bodies. On a Friday night in December, I sat in a small room with 33 other audience members, each of us accompanied by a dancer in black. The dancers pulled out blindfolds and covered our eyes, and for a brief moment, all was dark and quiet and freighted with anticipation. "Composition VII" by Wassily Kandinsky, 1913. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically." The soul is the piano with its many chords. Abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, who may have been a synesthete, once said: "Color is the key.
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