Synesthesia, Fantasia, Josh Ritter, and Your Favorite Sounds

The book I want to write about is somewhere in a box. Not much else needs to be said about the state of things the last week and a half. I’ll have to discuss that particular story collection another day. Instead, I thought I’d muse on something else that’s been on my mind: sound. The shape and color of sound, the way we write about sound, the way sound infuses you at a concert, and my list of people’s favorite sounds. Also, many of us in the nation’s capital are extremely sad that Tai Shan, the youngest of our pandas, will be leaving. His parents are on loan from China as part of a breeding and conservation effort, but Tai Shan was Born in the USA. His parents are scheduled to return to China next year.

When I talk about the shape and color of sound, I am being literal. As a synesthete, I “see” sounds. I don’t actually see colors that aren’t there, but with every sound, I automatically picture a shape and often a color. I think about this a lot when I’m writing; it enhances my descriptions, though once in a while, someone comments that describing a character’s voice as orange, for instance, is nonsense. However, many other artists and writers are also synesthestes—we experience synesthesia, in which one sense is crossed with another. Synesthesia has many forms, but in my case, I see color with every sense (it seems my visual cortex never shuts off). Taste, touch, sound, letters, numbers, words, ideas, concepts, months, weeks, groups of people or things, pain, pleasure—all of these have color. It helps me organize and remember. It also helps me identify what I’m hearing or what I’m feeling—what instruments are used in a song or what kind of pain is hurting my stomach, for example.

In writing, sound often gets neglected. Luckily, being able to see sounds helps me to think about its textures and subtleties. Even beyond writing, though, what we hear can get taken for granted. Sometimes I like to simply be still and pay attention to everything around me. I start with the smallest details. Sight: The shadows overlapping on the sidewalk, the lady bug crawling on a park bench. Touch: the breeze on my neck, the blades of grass scratching my ankle, the pebbles pressing through my sandal. Sound: distant shouts from a baseball game, the jangle of a dog's collar, someone ripping open a candy wrapper, the clack of heels on concrete, the rustle of newspaper blowing across the road.

I once read that people become addicted to noise, that we stop really hearing what’s around us, that we constantly need noise, have to fill up what we think is silence because we’ve become immune to the smaller sounds. Walking around a city is a constant barrage of noise—sirens, horns, trucks rumbling, bus brakes hissing, more horns and sirens. Yesterday, a cement truck with its rocky load churning and churning followed me for blocks and around a traffic circle. The city is an assault on the senses. And when we urbanites get away from the constant auditory barrage, we often fail to hear the nuances of other sounds. The article I read said that if someone who was used to constant noise were to go camping, for example, it would take a couple of days to be able to “hear” the detailed orchestra of nature. It is too easy to forget this kind of hearing, this kind of listening.

On an afternoon several years ago, during one of my high school track meets, I stood by the track cheering on my teammates. One of our fastest runners stood next to me. “Spikes on a track are my favorite sound,” she said. She meant the spiked shoes runners wear and the sound of those small metal points going up and down against the dirt lanes as the runners raced to the finish line—sweat and speed as sound.

Her words struck me. At fifteen, I had never thought about my favorite sound. People always ask about your favorite color or food or book but nobody ever asks about your favorite sound. So I started to. I began a list and tacked it up on my bulletin board to remind me to consider sound when writing.

Some of our favorite sounds:

Ice skates on ice, slapping mud against a pottery wheel, dried leaves beneath your feet, the scratch and fuzz of an old record playing, logs popping in a fire, typing on an old typewriter, revving a car’s engine, falling snow, the ocean tide, falling rain

The original list contains more, but that’s in a box somewhere, too. Tell me other favorite sounds—I’m always curious what people will say because it often gives some kind of insight into who they are and also because it forces me to think differently about what I hear and listen to. For me, all of these sounds have different shapes, colors, and textures, and in some way, people give this to me when they make me more conscious of sounds to listen for.

I have much more to say about synesthesia as related to sound and the other senses, but that’s a whole different post, and the book I want to refer to is—you guessed it—also in a box. Or, OK, I confess, I put all my books into paper Trader Joe’s bags to make them easier to carry. It’s somewhere in a bag, which somehow seems worse than it being in a box. In any case, I haven’t even touched on the colorful effect of music, but I wanted to mention Josh Ritter’s concert that R. and I attended last week, which was filled with many hues. Attending any kind of musical performance is always fascinating and entertaining because of the show of colors and shapes caused by the music. It’s Fantasia in my head. And Josh was fantastic, especially because you could tell how much fun he was having. The crowd was having it too. He’s also quite funny.

--C.