(This is your captain speaking; before we begin our flight, please open a new browser window in which to listen to the sound file attached. I wish I could do this more smoothly, but...uh...I really can't. Bear with me, please.)

Sounds, especially music, make pictures in my head.

I don’t know whether this is true synaesthesia, or just a sort of daydreaming, or something between the two. It’s a completely involuntary effect, although I can usually choose to focus on it or tune it out, as with most sensory phenomena—that makes me think it could be synaesthesia. On the other hand, I don’t see images and colors float before my eyes or cover my surroundings. They only exist in my mind, although sometimes very vividly, like a dream, or the way the story unfolds in your thoughts, a mental movie, when you’re reading a book.*

Either way, I picture the notes of a song as a little like drops of water. The moment a note is played or sung is like the moment a raindrop hits the surface of a pond, and like a burst of color, too. Ripples radiate outwards from the point where the note hits my imaginary pond, growing larger and fainter and paler, distorting other ripples as their paths cross. Guitars are particularly rainy-sounding. Sometimes, though, parts of a song can be more like clouds, or spirals, or darts of light racing towards a point. All colors, of course. Every color in the Crayola 64 pack, even the ones like berry and chartreuse and burnt sienna, and then some. White noise actually is white, if you’re curious. (Although if you subscribe to the “Pip-has-an-overactive-imagination” theory, rather than the competing “Pip-has-synaesthesia” theory, my mental image might well have been affected by the name.)
I love music; it should come as no surprise. I love to watch the unique pattern of a song unfold. I love how it is wild and seemingly chaotic (makes my heart beat faster) yet rigidly structured. With a really good song—or maybe I should say a song I really like, since the music that moves me runs a wide gamut that doesn’t pay particular attention to the boundaries of what’s normally considered good taste—I feel like my body is being filled with light and sound and I feel elated, like everything in the world is beautiful and logical and vibrant and I have to move, have to move, even if it’s just to tap my fingers to match the rhythm that’s pushing them to twitch. I have trouble understanding how anyone could not love music, or at least like it. It arouses so much sensation in me, I can’t really believe that it just leaves some people cold and unmoved—but it evidently does, and I’ve met people who say they don’t enjoy or understand the appeal of music. I sometimes wonder what they’re hearing, as it’s obviously not the same as what I’m hearing, but in the end I can never know what goes on in other people’s brains. I can look at scans and guess and make conjectures and ask them questions, but any information I receive will be secondhand, diluted. I’m curious about these things, but I can’t truly understand, and that is part of being human, I suppose.

This drawing is an approximation of what I think and feel when I listen to the Decemberists’ cover of Joanna Newsom’s “Bridges and Balloons”. It’s one of those everything-is-perfect songs, and is capable of completely obliterating even my worst mood, at least for the three minutes or so it lasts. And I will play it over and over again until everyone else in hearing distance is thoroughly sick of it (as I did while working on the drawing, which took a lot longer than three minutes to finish). I love the guitar strumming, and the echoes it makes, and the ripples, and Colin Meloy’s voice, which I think is sort of flat and crackly here, like static, in a good way, and the play of sound, syllables, words for their rhyme and scansion, words for their meaning. (Lateen sails! Yellow, but also the thought of ships, wind, starched cloth, the smell of salt in your nose, crisp and stinging.)

And I wanted to share that with you, in my limited, secondhand way.



* But sometimes, strangely, I do hallucinate songs—songs I know, being played outside of my head, like they’re on the radio or the CD player, except they aren’t. They tend to be extremely vivid, sounding exactly like the song does when I’m hearing it for real (or only slightly faint, as though someone is playing the song one room over). I only know they’re illusions because I know I’m not playing any music when I hear them, and because nobody else around me ever perceives them. They come and go without any cause, effect, or pattern that I can determine, can last any length of time from a few seconds to several minutes, and for the most part don’t interfere with my normal existence. At worst, they’re a bit distracting.
Despite having these auditory hallucinations, I’m pretty sure I’m sane. At least sane-ish. I mean, it’s not like I think there are tiny demons in my ears telling me to assassinate the Pope, or alien microchips implanted in my brain that allow me to eavesdrop on CIA communications. I’m not psychotic or delusional. I hope.