R1 Reading Response

For my producing class my partner and I decided to create a mock documentary about the links between creativity and synesthesia. I originally pitched the idea to my partner because there was a musical artist from Norway named Ida Maria that I listened to all throughout high school who I had just recently found out had synesthesia. I had no idea what it was until I looked her up at the prompting of my dad (who kind of fell into my obsession with her after me). The idea of synesthesia is hard to comprehend, especially because I have associations of different colors with different things but that’s more of a learning technique that was used when I was younger for memory purposes and there are certain classes that I have now that I associate with different colors. However, synesthesia is not just an association it’s a visual manifestation of color in response to something like numbers or letters. In the case of Ida Maria, she saw music as color, which obviously encouraged her to pursue music as a career. 

There was another woman we researched, Taria Camerino, who was a pastry chef that tasted color, music, shapes as well as other people’s emotions. She was able to identify objects based only on their taste. I always found it so interesting that their experiences with synesthesia seemed to inform their careers and what they did with their lives. Even with Daniel Tammett, he showed a few paintings he made that depicted how he viewed certain calculations. While the equation element was unique, the attempt to recreate what synesthetics see in response to certain objects and words is pretty common from the research I did last year (there was one artist who would listen to a song and paint what she saw and each painting was titled with the name of the song that inspired it).