I can remember the first moment I realised I had synaesthesia, a brain phenomenon experienced by 2% to 4% of the population, in which stimulation of one sense leads to automatic experiences in a second sense. I was three years old and somebody played the B note on the piano. The whole room went white, like a blizzard. I remember thinking: “Wow, B feels good, doesn’t it?”
Back then I didn’t know there was a word for my experiences; I just knew I loved to be around music because of the thrill it gave me. Each note looked like a certain colour, becoming more sophisticated and textured as I grew up. Listening to pieces of music became an almost psychedelic experience. Some would give me an emerald green effect or feel like I was in the warp drive in Star Trek. Others would trigger this feeling of floating in billowing waves of purple. It was exhilarating but overwhelming. I remember listening to an opera and thinking: “God, you can hardly see in pieces like this.” I still thought everybody saw the world this way.
Not only did synaesthesia give me a great appreciation for music, I suspect it gave me a great advantage too. Like that scene in The Queen’s Gambit where Beth plays out entire chess games in her mind. I don’t need to memorise a piece of music because it’s playing out in front of me in colour – similar to playing Guitar Hero. Playing in tune comes easily to me and I can be incredibly focused. My parents picked up on this talent and sent me to Kent Junior Music School, where I learnt the violin. We’d play these passionate pieces and I remember thinking “more purple, more purple”.
I was in my early teens when I first heard the word synaesthesia. A family friend had just discovered she had grapheme-colour synaesthesia – when one’s brain associates letters and numbers with certain colours. For years, I’d been describing my feelings of sensory overload when I listened to music. I’d always found orchestras tiring because they’re so noisy and my violin teacher used to tell me off for doing my scales with my eyes closed. My dad must have made the link.
Eventually I learnt that I have chromesthesia (auditory-visual) synaesthesia; a common form in which specific sounds evoke the experience of seeing colours. I started talking more openly about it but that led to me being picked on. I remember sitting in my school brass band, playing a piece of music that looked so ecstatically beautiful I ended up crying. A girl turned around and told me everyone thought I was weird.
It took me more than 20 years to start talking about synaesthesia again after that. I went on to play in orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and that feeling of breathing together – with everyone in flow – felt like ecstasy. I regularly teach about performance anxiety but the irony is performing is often the only time I don’t have anxiety. I get anxious in crowds, queueing in the interval – but getting on stage? That’s the easy part.
When I decided to speak about my synaesthesia again, it was nerve-racking. After a period of depression at work, a mental health specialist helped me to reframe my synaesthesia as a gift. I realised I had an opportunity to raise awareness and help those eight-year-old synaesthetes who might also be scared of being bullied.
Since then I’ve created a primary school program about normalising difference and I’ve launched an album of improvised sound baths in nature as a way of promoting awareness of neurodivergence. A big part of both projects is improvisation: a wonderful way to surprise my brain and boost my synaesthesia.
I’ve also been researching the 1930s Australian composer Miriam Hyde, who had auditory-visual synaesthesia like me. She too struggled with sensory overload and her diaries talk about hyper-focusing on the piano for eight hours at a time, which I relate to.
She is also an icon because she was 65 when doing a lot of her greatest work. At 57, it’s got me thinking: what if I run concerts for neurodiverse people, with fewer bright lights and less hanging about at the interval? Could I create an online community for synaesthetes?
I feel passionately that we should be encouraging synaesthetes to thrive in schools, because they’ll be the ones who turn into great synaesthetic artists like Billie Eilish and Lorde and Miriam Hyde. It’ll also stop them from being depressed or bullied – because that’s often the alternative without framing this phenomenon as the superpower it really is.
Synaesthesia is not a disorder; it’s a variation of human perception (a neurodiversity) that should be celebrated. I only wish I’d discovered that decades earlier.
Anina Rich, a cognitive neuroscientist and chair of the Synaesthesia Research Group at Macquarie University, assisted in reporting this series
