Jul. 14, 2020

Music has always been a major part of my life. I began learning piano and music theory as a young child and continued playing until high school. During that time I also played the violin, flute, and saxophone.

Whilst in university in 2017, I started noticing unique visual representations of music tones through colours when listening to music. I then decided to pay more attention to them after learning about the artist, Wassily Kandinsky, in a Russian language course. Then in the summer of 2018, I took an intermediate drawing course and chose to officially begin the process of visually illustrating my experiences. It was then when I started taking detailed notes and realising that there were patterns between what I heard and saw visually. Since 2018, I have been continually diving deeper and deeper into the world, of what I now know to be as, synesthesia.

Synesthesia, as I experience it, could be defined as ‘the crossing of senses’. I mainly experience the evoking of colour and line directions from hearing music.

The earliest memory I have access to of my synesthesia is from 2013 when I was visiting family in another part of the U.S. I was listening to a song I recently downloaded at the time, and was specifically focussing on the ambience of the song. I noticed that specific parts of the song caused me to feel as if I was on a differently sloped plane. The dominant feeling was a negatively sloped line where I was tilted towards my left. At this time of my life, I was not focussed on the details of music theory that I learnt years ago. Looking back now, I finally know that this feeling is a representation of a specific chord in the song’s chord progression. To me, this negatively sloped line/plane is the relationship of E-minor with D-major.

As more time has passed, I realised that I also have the ability of absolute pitch. Namely, I am able to name single tones and chords as I hear them, although chords and chord progressions are more difficult sometimes.

Overall, these experiences have given me a deeper look into how I perceive the world and even the extraordinary behind the curtain. Because there is still more beyond my understanding about synesthesia, I am compelled to follow my curiosity until the very end.

-Garrett Porter