Posthuman Synaesthesia

The cognitive triggering of visual manifestations of light and colour from the sensory input of sound is called synaesthesia. Researcher, Bulat M. Galeyev (1940 - 2009) describes synaesthesia as, “a specific manifestation of nonverbal thinking, realised by either involuntary or purposeful comparison of the impressions of different modalities, on the basis of structural or semantic and, most of all, emotional similarity.” Thus, it can be said that synaesthesia is a mode of feeling-thinking. I am not an 'involuntary' synaesthete: the Soundscape works rely on the technology of a spectrometer to trigger visual interpretations of sound. However, I make aesthetic decisions about the sounds that I record and the colours that I assign to shapes made by the spectrogram. I consider the process of Soundscapes to be a form of Posthuman synaesthesia: technologically-mediated, purposeful, nonverbal thinking.