{"id":18581,"date":"2021-10-18T17:56:10","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T21:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/splice.com\/blog\/?p=18581"},"modified":"2025-10-09T18:01:02","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T22:01:02","slug":"audio-tactile-synesthesia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/splice.com\/blog\/audio-tactile-synesthesia\/","title":{"rendered":"Audio-tactile synesthesia: Can you feel what I hear?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Illustration:<\/strong> Islenia Milien<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time a psychologist told me I had synesthesia, I laughed and told her that was ridiculous.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The first thing that came to mind were people seeing colors when they listened to music. I had watched Fantasia<\/em>, and I assured her that did not<\/em> happen in my brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But many things in life aren’t one-size-fits-all. Synesthesia is the confusion of two senses within the body, where you experience one sense through another. She started to explain that there’s more than just one type of synesthesia, just as there are five senses in the human body. When it comes to synesthesia, seeing colors when you hear music (audio-visual<\/em>) is simply the most common and the most popularized by the media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that wasn\u2019t what I had. I had audio-tactile<\/em> synesthesia. Hearing things makes me feel physical sensations, and it\u2019s not something everyone around me experiences every day. She told me it was something to appreciate and find fascinating. I could feel something while also hearing something. But more than anything, realizing that what I experienced wasn\u2019t typical made me feel exceptionally lonely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I experience as a synesthete<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While it might sound really cool to feel physical sensations when hearing sounds, it’s actually quite exhausting. I can find myself easily overwhelmed and live by having filtered earplugs in my ears. But, I learned that if I familiarize myself with my triggers, it becomes a lot more manageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Spotify Wrapped clocked my listening time at 98,671 minutes. According to “Seasons of Love,” there are 525,600 minutes in a year. So, 18% of my year was spent listening to some form of noise. To put that into perspective, the average person sleeps for seven – eight hours a night (24% of the year) and works 40-hour work weeks (22% of the year, accounting for holidays). I was listening to music like it was a full-time job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because it was\u2014I listen to so much music because I wanted to get used to what I felt when I heard something. It started making me rather numb to a lot of things. When I hear something different, I know it almost immediately because I\u2019ll feel something I hadn\u2019t before. It makes me curious and obsessed with the sound until I can add it to my own body\u2019s dictionary of sound-to-feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connecting music with physical feelings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So what do I feel? For me, listening to different vocal syncopations, synth patterns, etc., all make me feel something. I assumed that everyone felt what I felt when they heard music, because that’s its power. But, things got more pronounced as I got older. I think it\u2019s because I had more words to describe what I was feeling. I had experienced more things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vocal syncopation is the rhythmic pattern of someone\u2019s voice, where the accent is on the weak beats or the ‘less expected’ beats of a rhythm. Daywaiter’s vocals from the verse of webcage’s \u201cnoncents\u201d makes me feel vibrations in my fingers that are similar to when you play a g\u00fciro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n