Research & Planning - Synaesthesia

[Synaesthesia Diagram]

Synaesthesia is the stimulation of one sense in reaction to something, leading to the automatic and involuntary experience in one or more other senses. An example of this would be if someone were to see the colour red and perhaps automatically think of a raspberries taste, due to their minds subconscious association. Most people associate particular colours with particular days or the week, or even months of the year. This is a common example of synaesthesia.

[Synaesthesia of the Months]

A typical game formulated to test the minds conciousness as to what it sees, and what it thinks, has been adapted into the Nintendo DS's "brain training" game. In this game you are asked to read out the colour which has been written out, however the colour of the writing will be different to colour the word says, for example; "orange" will be written out in the colour blue. You want to say orange but find yourself saying blue. This is to see whether you will involuntarily mention the colour that is shown rather than the word.

Synaesthesia can be an important aspect to music videos as it can make the video ideal, or just weird. Redundancy and entropy, will eventually boil down to the directors synaesthesia towards the track.

When planning this track, me and my media partner sat and listened to the song several times airing ideas when they came to mind, this was extremely useful. Although these ideas didn't come in the correct order, they helped structure the basis of the story allowing us to fill in the gaps with relevant ideas. A useful element to this is how varied the song is with high energy parts, deep thoughtful parts, ambient parts and finally ending on in emotive mind set. This variation allows for an interesting and captivating video story line.