If you Have Synesthesia it means you can actually see music. Yes that's right SEE music! Or you can hear color.



It's a neurological condition that I find really facinating! I even tried to see if I could do it, but it didn't work. I needed these videos to really understand what this actually meant. Also, it made me wonder about people with the condition who don't have the tools to make such cool videos...must be a tricky claim to make to your friends!


Motion Graphics: 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. More than 60 types of synesthesia have been identified, with one of the most common being the cross-sensory experience of color and sound — “hearing” color or “seeing” music.

These neurological eccentricities, however, can often be a source of tremendous artistic inspiration. I want to share with you, three mesmerizing near-synesthetic ways of experiencing sound and color.


1.

Michal Levy
Israeli artist and jazz musician Michal Levy is an actual synesthetic: When she listens to music, she sees shapes and colors as different tones, pitches, frequencies, harmonies, and other elements of the melody unfold. Her fantastic animated film, Giant Steps, captures this unique experience, visualizing the iconic John Coltrane masterpiece as Michal sees it in her mind’s synesthetic eye.






link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV4Iwh6Kl1c

Michal’s latest film, One, is yet another vibrant journey into sonic color. Her creative process is quite extraordinary, like peering into a mind that functions on an entirely different sensory level!








2.

Esteban Diácono
Let Yourself Feel is a mesmerizing animation by Argentinian motion graphics designer Esteban Diácono, visualizing “Slowly” by composer Ólafur Arnalds in spellbinding colorful smoke.






link: http://a.vimeocdn.com/p/flash/moogaloop/5.1.17/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6045312



3.

Stephen Malinowski
Since 1985, composer, inventor and software engineer Stephen Malinowski has been bringing an intuitive, visceral understanding to classical music’s greatest masterpieces. His Music Animation Machine, which we have featured previously, distills some of the most complex compositions in music history into digestable, beautiful visualizations...






link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqe0GdUpJHs




Pretty nuts right!? Hope you enjoyed the post.