‘Synesthesia an Artistic Experimentation’

The following portion of paper was take from Psyche Monash website. This article discusses the connection between synesthesia and art. It discusses both the condition and the relationship synesthsia effect has on artists and their product. The paper is written as a response on another paper by Cywic (1995).

“By the mid-nineteenth century synesthesia had intrigued an art movement that sought sensory fusion, according to Cytowic (1995, section 3.7; 1993, pp. 54 ff). The union of the senses appeared more and more frequently in the writings of musicians and visual artists. Multimodal concerts of music and light became popular. Cytowic argues that "such deliberate contrivances are qualitatively different from the involuntary experiences that I am calling synesthesia in this review" (Cytowic, 1995, section 3.7). He defines synesthesia as the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. He sharply distinguishes its phenomenology from "metaphor, literary tropes, sound symbolism, and deliberate artistic contrivances that sometimes employ the term 'synesthesia' to describe their multisensory joinings" (Cytowic, 1995, abstract).”

“Cytowic places artistic experiments with sensory fusion outside the domain of synesthesia research. He sharply distinguishes the sensory perception of synesthesia from mental cross-modal associations by non-synesthetes in metaphoric language, and in artistic aspirations to sensory fusion (Cytowic, 1995, section 3.2; 1993, pp. 54ff). Cytowic has proposed five criteria to define or diagnose synesthesia and to distinguish it from sensory fusion, sound symbolism, metaphor etc. Synesthesia is characterized by phenomena of cross-modal association that are involuntary (but elicited), projected, durable (discrete and generic), memorable, emotional (and noetic)”
“As most of the artistic reports of sensory fusion do not meet these five criteria, Cytowic concludes that artistic experiments may be historically interesting but are not relevant to the present study of synesthesia. He lumps various deliberate multi-sensory contrivances under the term "sensory fusion", and places them outside the history of involuntary synesthesia.”
“On the basis of the published facts about the lives and work of Scriabin and Kandinsky, it can be concluded that their synesthetic experiments were based on involuntary experiences that met Cytowic's criteria of synesthesia in general. However, it should be noted that the criteria of involuntarity and projection were not clear enough to enable a proper evaluation.”

“A historical review may shed a different light on Cytowic's view that artistic experiments were historically interesting but not relevant for the present study of synesthesia. It appears that Scriabin's and Kandinsky's experiments were based on involuntary experiences of synesthesia. They investigated emotional and perceptual mechanisms of synesthesia that could help them in creating art. Their experiments with movement and dissonance are interesting explorations of aspects of synesthesia, which have been hardly studied in the current scientific research of synesthesia.”
“Contrary to Cytowic's view, I conclude that artistic experimentation is not only historically interesting, but can also contribute to the present synesthesia research. For instance, the experiments of Scriabin and Kandinsky have revealed important synesthetic aspects of perception. Scriabin's experimentation with color-key correspondences offer alternatives to the current research into color-letter and color-tone correspondences. Kandinsky's explorations of the consonance and dissonance of simultaneous auditory and visual stimuli offers alternatives for Gestalt experiments to the current experiments with elementary stimuli (letters, tones). And their ideas on the interplay of auditory and visual stimuli can be elaborated and tested with multimedia instruments.”

“In my opinion, Cytowic's sharp demarcation of science and art is not fruitful for the study of synesthesia. From a broad perspective, Cytowic considers art and science as two sides of a coin and perceives a sharp demarcation line in history between scientific study and artistic experiments (Cytowic, 1989). However, in the study of perceptual phenomena, scientists and artists have often used each others' discoveries to start new directions in their own disciplines (Gombrich, 1960; Kemp, 1990; Gage, 1993). In this way, artistic experimentation can contribute to new directions in synesthesia research too.” (Campen. C 1997)

http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v3/psyche-3-06-vancampen.html