RE: [-empyre-] Synaesthesia, with James Patterson, Amit Pitaru, and Joel Swanson

["Amit Pitaru [LIST]" <list@pitaru.com>]

> What came first? The sound as creative process, or the image as informing
sound?

We get asked this a lot, and it's always hard to explain. This is the first
time I'll attempt to answer it seriously, so please bear with me :-)

The short answer is that although some projects start with a sound and
others with visuals, during the production they are treated on equal terms -
and maybe even considered as one and the same. 

Where your question relates to the explicit mapping of one onto the other, I
try to create an experience that is mapped implicitly in the viewer's mind.
I think that the history of Synaesthesia has been dealing with the exact
same question: 

Around 1880, Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin) wrote a reveling article about
Synaesthesia in nature magazine. In his article, Galton describes people
that see colors when looking at numbers and hearing sounds. He calls them
'seers', and softly alluding that they are 'the people of the future'.
Following the publication, the subject quickly became a hot topic in
publications and social events: 

"A question of much interest in these days is that of color hearing.
It has been repeatedly discussed in the daily press and literary and
scientific reviews; it has been the subject of medical thesis... it has
figured in poetry, in romance and even in the theatre."
Alfred Binet, Psychologist. 1983

The 'outing' of the Synaesthetic phenomenon influenced artists in various
ways; it provided some artists with words to describe what they've been
doing all along, while others took the idea literally, using available
technology to devise custom audio-visual tools - often thinking that they
are the first to do so:

"It is an odd fact that almost everyone who develops a color-organ is
under the misapprehension that he, or she, is the first mortal
to attempt to do so" [Klein 1927, Color-Music: the Art of Light].

And in fact, audio-visual tools have been around for centuries. For example,
on the basis of Newton's color-harmonies theory, the French Jesuit Castel
developed a color harpsichord (clavecin oculaire) around 1720. In
collaboration with the instrument maker Rondet, Castel drafted a harpsichord
with colored paper strips (lighted with candle-light) that would appear on
top of the instrument when an organ-key was pressed. Interestingly, every
time that a new sound theory or projection technology emerges, there's a
renewed interest in audio-visual tools. It was so at 1789 with oil lamps,
again at 1870 with gas lamps . and lately with the wide availability of
projectors.
 
Many of these color-organs were originaly created in the spirit of 'allowing
everyone to be synaesthites'.. attempting to reproduce this magical linear
translation of visuals to sound and vise versa (although there is no record
of a sound->visual synaesthites). In that respect, Jennifer's question falls
into the classic understanding of Synaesthesia as linear mapping of one
sense onto the other. 

But I don't see my work as an act of mapping. My view of Synaesthesia is
aligned with Neuroscientists like Ramachandran, who claim that we are all
synaesthites to a degree, and that the condition may be heightened among
artists. This inter-connectedness of senses allows for the complex
metaphorical and abstract thought process to take place towards artistic
creation (Ramachandran recently discovered that artists are seven times more
prone to be synaesthites).

In that respect I feel that the most interesting ties between sound, audio
and gestures are not in how they map onto each other linearly, but how they
feedback of each other recursively. I'm interested in the simultaneous
emotional feedback between sounds and visuals and kinetics and smell. I'm
interested in how the senses augment themselves recursively into what we
know as a unified experience. 

Obviously I'm not the first to think this way. For example, Russian composer
Scriabin attempted to associate our *emotional* response to color with our
emotional response to tonality. I guess that Kandinsky's group did the same
with harmony, as Mondrian with rhythm. This was a breakthrough in comparison
to others who treated the relationship between sound and visuals as an
exercise in mathematical frequency mappings.