It can also be called hearing motion or visually-induced auditory synesthesia
It can be called kinetics-to-sound if it refers to hearing one’s own body movements
1. Hearing GIFs and animations
When is it not synesthesia?
An informal study carried out via Twitter by a researcher from Glasgow University received thousands of responses from readers and determined that almost 70% of people were able to hear the skipping (and thumping) electricity pylon.
And when can it be considered synesthesia?
However,
there is a small percentage of people who consistently hear all kinds of GIFs,
including abstract forms in movement that cannot be associated with any
real-life sounds at all. It is possible that automatically and consistently
hearing this kind of GIFs is a type of synesthesia. Here’s an example:
2. Hearing the movements of the elements around us
3. Hearing your own body movements
When is it not synesthesia?
Some people
have auditory sensitivity to certain biological processes, such as their
heartbeat or the blood flowing through their veins. Some of them hear their
eyes blink or hear their neck when they turn their head. There are physical
causes for these phenomena that are not related to synesthesia.
And when can it be considered synesthesia?
Here are
some descriptions written by people with these possible types of synesthesia:
“I watch my cat walk across the floor. His legs “schwoot” and his paws “top top” and his tail “hums” from side to side. Example 2: I am in yoga class, we are doing shoulder rolls. My neighbor’s motion sounds like like an industrial machine of some kind... “WoooOOO... woooOOO.” Most sounds are machine-like in fact.”
(Source: This post on Reddit/Synesthesia. 2020.)
"Strobe light, deafening, if they’re going fast enough the noise is going to get loud enough to blind me, it’s like a fuzzy white out when it happens.”
(Source: This comment on Reddit/Synesthesia. 2020.)
"For the longest time I’ve heard sounds to seeing and feeling movement. This is especially true for my own moving body but can be heard mentally watching other people or things move.
For
instance, if I take a step to grab a cup from a cupboard, I hear my leg, body,
arm and fingers as they twist extend and contract. Almost as if I was a robot
with rusty joints. And depending on the movement/speed/and limb it’s a
different pitch that rises and falls. As different parts are moving I hear them
simultaneously. (...)
I’ve always been a bit fascinated with dancers. Not sure exactly why. Maybe it’s because the sound of their movements matches the actual sound and it’s like a strange reverb effect where everything is in sync.”
(Source: This post and comment on Reddit/Synesthesia. 2020.)
“I can hear touch (...).
Well, "hear" in a sense. I can’t actually hear it as if the sound were playing in real life, but the sound plays in the back of my head. I knew about this my entire life, but I really started to think about it recently. For example, every time I touch one of my fingers to my thumb it plays a high or low pitch sound, depending on which finger. Almost like a piano. But it's more noticeable with movement. When I see something move but it makes no noise, my brain fills in the silence with a sound. Everything has its own sound, but it's usually not the sound it'd make if it wasn’t silent.”
(Source: This post on Reddit/Do I Have Synesthesia. 2021.)
Some links:
Here’s an interesting article on the “visually evoked auditory response” (VEAR) and the skipping and thumping electricity pylon phenomenon.
Here’s an ongoing research study on hearing GIFs you can participate in.
Concept-sound synesthesia
Another
type of synesthesia, much less common but possibly related, involves perceiving
sounds, pitches or musical notes in response to concepts that do not necessarily
move but which form part of a group, series or sequence. Some synesthetes report
auditory reactions to different shapes, time units, graphemes, colours, people or even hairstyles!
Go to the page on Concept-sound synesthesia
This page last updated: 08 December 2022
what if it´s vice versa? I can feel sound like movements but visual... this is strange to explain. closing eyes, hear sound and than it s like seeing the sounds in waves and forms, but more like touching or feeling them.... hope it s enough as base info
ReplyDeleteI believe that what you describe would be classified as belonging to auditory-visual synesthesia, as for many synesthetes the "visual" experience is actually somewhere between "seeing" and "feeling", movement and direction can be an important part of the perception, and waves and shapes/lines (without colour) are certainly a possible concurrent. There is a lot of variety in auditory-visual, with different synesthetes having quite different experiences. https://www.thesynesthesiatree.com/2021/02/auditory-visual-synesthesia.html
DeleteI can feel every instruments/vocals in every songs (even if it’s the first time I’ve listen to it). All different parts of my body know which movements represent that instruments/vocals. It seems like my brain doesn’t have to think, it’s involuntary. Really hard to explain but it feels magical every time!!!
ReplyDeleteYears ago, I took a hit of LSD and we heard the intro track of a hip hop album. When closing your eyes you could see the music form into colorful shapes that match the pitch and the tone in shapes similar to a kaleidoscope. Each note gave echoing feelings of pleasure and reverberating euphoria as if you were on a rollercoaster ride. We played the 1minute song over and over again....DM
ReplyDeleteMy son has several types of vision to sound synesthesia plus kinetics to sound. He hears everything involuntarily. Movement to sound, shapes to sound, flashing (or bright light) to sound, his body movements to sound. He even hears things like the direction, speed and rotation of tennis balls mid-flight or the number of times a bird's wings flap...His description is at: https://mattjazz123.com/process.html#/ .
ReplyDeleteVery interesting! I'll add him to the Tree website on this page and the synesthete artists page.
DeleteMaybe this one describes me. Blinking lights are loud to me. It is a pre-sound sound. The noise before a noise happens. And they are unpleasant. I HATE blinking lights, especially if they go quickly. The quicker they blink, the noisier they are.
ReplyDeleteI am hearing, but attend a lot of Deaf chats. I recently realized how loud they are to me and that I’m struck by an absence of loudness when I leave the chats. I mean, these chats are often loud enough that I don’t even hear anything outside of the group. When I leave the group, I am struck by how quiet they are, and this is overtaken by noise when I rejoin the conversations. The quality of noise is similar to any other social gathering where people are talking out loud, but also different at the same time. I find social gatherings of hearing people to sometimes be overwhelming by how loud they get, but with the Deaf chats, they are just loud in a different way. Pre-noise noise. Sound before it happens, but not in an unpleasant way.