Synaesthesia (adj)
A secondarysensation accompanying an actual perception, as the perceiving of sound as acolor or the sensation of being touched in a place at some distance from theactual place of touching.

Jess Goley and Natasha Bledsoeare the two women that I was able to come into contact with. We were able tohave conversations through email to help me understand their synaesthesia type.Jess experiences alphabetic/numeric synaesthesia, where she groups certaincolors to certain letters/numbers. In one of our conversations she describesthe experience as seeing “an aura of the color around the letter/number.”

Natasha Bledsoe experiences thealphabetic/numeric and music/color types of synaesthesia. Natasha alsoexplained her alphabetic/numeric synaesthesia, “Like I can see that the letters are written in black or whatever othercolor, but it's almost like they have a glow of the color they're"supposed" to be.” From the way she describes her music/colorsynaesthesia, this type seems to be the most enjoyable. “The color/music isamazing, with that one it is like layers over reality. If I'mriding in a car, listening to music I can see the sounds. They kind of trickleinto view and sometimes appear as spots or soft wavelengths of color.”

The music/color aspect ofsynaesthesia is what really drew me in to this subject. I really love listening to all typesof music, and I just keep thinking of how of how cool it would be if I wereable to experience music that way. If I think really hard I can kind ofexperience this rare phenomenon, but I’d rather experience it naturally.

The collaboration was somethingthat worked through trial and error. I started my research by getting to knownboth women, and figuring out what best triggered their synaesthesia. I wouldemail them images that I had taken, and they would draw what they saw withtheir synaesthesia. For Natasha, with her music/color synaesthesia, I wouldgive her a song to listen to for each image.