The Sensation of Synesthesia

By Tony Olivero Pulling his keyboard from beneath a glass tabletop in his Euclid Avenue bedroom, James Redenbaugh strikes the E-flat note. The note rings through the room for several seconds, and Redenbaugh freezes. The sound overtakes him. Finger on the key, he envisions a similar shade of white his friend Matt Wood described two weeks prior. It’s nothing but the best white anyone could imagine. Redenbaugh lifts his finger, pauses for a split-second, and speaks.

“I think I see why he said that,” Redenbaugh says of Wood. “For some reason—I don’t know how to explain it—it’s the holiest note.”

Two weeks prior, Wood professed that E-flat was his favorite musical note. After a lifetime reading, learning and reciting music, Wood’s an authority on the subject. He has “absolute pitch,” a sensory condition that is a subtype of synesthesia—a neurological condition that causes one sensory experience to automatically trigger another sensory or cognitive perception. Wood’s synesthetic absolute pitch allows him to almost instantly memorize music without the aid of an external reference. Simply, Wood doesn’t need to read music on a piece of paper—it’s all in his head. He’s one in ten thousand.

Redenbaugh doesn’t have absolute pitch, though. He can’t break down every part of any song into exact correct pitches, nor can he instantly replay any guitar riff like Wood. But he is an anomaly as well. He can hear colors not just in music, but in emotions and people as well.

Redenbaugh has synesthesia too but his condition is not identical to Wood’s. That’s because synesthesia is an endless, boundless condition unique to each who has it. Reports show that there are sixty different subtypes of Synethesia , the most common ­­­being color-graphemic synesthesia—the ability to identify colors with numbers and letters.

There is no concrete understanding of synesthesia, and some try to solve it with science while others try to understand it through spirit. Whatever the truth, the only certainty is synesthetes have an understanding of themselves unlike anything a non-synesthete could ever envision.

And those understandings are rarely, if ever, identical because, according to certain biological theories, there can be as many types of synesthesia as there are sensory modality pairings. In other words: additional connections between brain areas or synapses might lead to a breakdown of otherwise independent units, thus resulting in the synthesis—or union—of senses. That is synesthesia and all of its flavors, from Wood’s ability to read music in his head to Redenbaugh’s penchant of associating colors with people.

But the abilities of those with synesthesia are shrouded in mystery, even if famous artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel are known synesthetes. And while the experiences are original to the subject, they are relatable to others with the condition. The subject just has to knows if he or she has the condition in the first place.

“I remember when I was young, telling my mom every number and letter had a color,” Redenbaugh says. “I figured everybody else had that experience until the end of my freshman year of college, [synesthesia] came up in a reading in architecture. I then realized synesthesia is what I have.”

Wood didn’t discover his own synesthesia until his junior year in high school, a year after he realized his music mimicking abilities. The true confirmation came when listening to the seminal 1913 33 minute long French ballet “The Rite of Spring.” While sitting in a car he dozed off, and the violent rhythmic structures in the song produced ribbons of color in his head. When trying to describe his condition to non-synesthetes Wood says it looks something like the iTunes Visualizer. If they still can’t picture it, he asks them, “Imagine seeing the face of a good friend of yours. How do you see that? And would you ever forget it?”

Redenbaugh and his friend and fellow synesthete Tim Gale agree with Wood’s descriptions of synesthesia. Gale didn’t realize he had synesthesia until Redenbaugh met him sophomore year in Syracuse University’s architecture program last spring. With the meeting, Gale remembers Redenbaugh saying one thing that stood out: “Yellow”. Rednebaugh was speaking of the color Gale seemingly radiated .

“I was just looking at that part of my mind where [Gale] was. That’s how it is with every person. Every person has a color,” Redenbaugh said. “The color stays the same from the time I meet them. I think in a way the color is the emotion. But only in a way.”

A kaleidoscopic can of worms is the best way to describe synesthesia, and since Gale realized he had the condition he hasn’t questioned it in the least. While it's unusual for Gale to keep quite on his life, he’s only talked about his condition a few times. He and Redenbaugh both share a passion for spiritual peace of mind, as Gale says he himself is one who questions everything in life.

But synesthesia is where these questions stop. Gale sees a color associated with something when he touches it, and his skin can barely graze ice or frigid metals. It sends a tingling and, yes, a feeling of color through his body.

Sometimes, he also sees flowing conduits of color with dots jumping up and down. It’s the same vision Wood saw when he listened to Radiohead’s “Let Down” from the album OK Computer. Tapping into his absolute pitch, Wood tried explaining the song visually. With the opening melancholy guitar riff, Wood saw the guitar “In space, up on top, almost making like little dots”. What he saw was strident. “A straight line through a chaos of movement, holding notes for a very long time.” It’s a very blue and grey song, and the OK Computer cover artwork reflects that. In a sense, the artwork is the song. It is synesthesia.

“The song is descending. The structures are descending,” Wood says. “It goes ‘A, A-flat, F-sharp, B’ and that descending…That is the ‘Let Down!’ Look at the album artwork!”

Back in Redenbaugh’s room, the synesthete hangs an abstract painting on his wall. The colors aren’t identical to the OK Computer album artwork which baffled Wood, but they are eerily close. Redenbaugh says the painting conjures a feeling of bliss. The white and light blue in the painting provide just that. The bliss replaces Wood’s “let down”, as Redenbaugh painted it himself. He was just painting how he felt, and let the colors do the talking. For even within colors lies much more of synesthesia’s boundless capabilities.

“There is a texture, a sensibility, a hue, a motion change, but really there is depth,” Redenbaugh says. “The color I assign to people and things has to do with my experience with that thing. It’s a very complicated image, and the more I look into it the more it changes.”

With constant change comes a challenge to provide answers about synesthesia. So far, no one has been able to pinpoint the cognitive and biological reasoning behind synesthesia, and why it varies from person to person. Doctor Joseph P. McFall, a visiting assistant Professor of Psychology at Syracuse University, doesn’t profess to be an expert on perception and synesthesia, and so, when trying to explain it he equates the condition to cross-activation of different brain regions during sensory processing.

“Perhaps synesthesia is an abnormality in which sensory information from a brain regions travels further than usual and ends up making its way to another brain region,” McFall says. “So, perhaps auditory information is processed simultaneously with visual information, creating a visual illusion of sounds, possibly because signals normally inhibited after processing are reprocessed by another sensor region.”

That’s one way to look at it, but Gale sees as much, if not more, spirituality in synesthesia than science. The synesthete says that he believes science and spirituality meet at the exact point in the most complete union. And he hints that synesthesia may be one of those points where spirituality and science collide.

It’s just Gale’s raw belief, but Redenbaugh says he and every other synesthete he’s met has a sense of spirit. Based on his bedroom however, one could guess Redenbaugh would preach this. The back wall is a solid blood red, with the paint geometrically rising perpendicularly into a few of Redenbaugh’s ceiling tiles. He painted it himself. On the disheveled couch in the center of the room is a drum roll, on the floor is an amp, hanging above the amp are two guitars on the side wall and further above the guitars is an upside-down can of dried yellow paint, its drops in a permanent freefall. Other paintings adorn the walls in the room, but the one piece of art on the wall facing Redenbaugh is the most synesthetic of all.

It is comprised of 500 painting samples in a large rectangle comprising most of the wall. Redenbaugh gets up from the keyboard and the couch and turns off every light in the room. He turns on a single lamp pointed at the samples and the lights change colors every second or so, as does each and every sample. As the colors cycle Redenbaugh says he believes the cycle represents the different ways of viewing the world.

“That’s what is so fun about it, because you can say ‘there are no answers,’” Redenbaugh says. “I think in general there are no answers. For me I think that is what is so exciting about synesthesia and life.”

He turns the lights back on and returns to the couch. There, he shares his self-synesthetic analysis when asked about the colors he sees in himself. With his answer, Redenbaugh reaffirms the mystical universe of Synesthesia.

And at the center of it all is that ultimate white.

“Depending on who I look at myself to be a different color comes up,” Redenbaugh says. “If I look at my personality and identity I see yellow and turquoise. But if I look to my awareness, to the deepest part of myself, if I look toward my center the part of where things are coming from, it’s pure white light.”