Becoming Mary Ellen ButeGDNM

Mary Ellen Bute: Seeing SoundMary was a pioneer American film animator, her speciality was visual music. As a group we recreated her visual animations to create our own versions of her work, we showed our animation on 8 computer screens, which you had to listen to through headphones. On each screen there would be a different part of information playing

about her. My animation was about synesthesia, because her work relates to it as its about seeing and hearing sound as a colour.

Stills taken from my animation on synesthesia

Becoming Mary Ellen ButeGDNM

What Is Synesthesia?- A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.- A sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus applied to another, as in referred pain.- The description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe another.

Some people can taste and see certain words, letters or numbers, depending on how strong there synesthesia is. When people with certain types of synesthesia look at the image on the left below, they can easily detect the six figures facing the opposite way, as shown in the image on the right. To these people, the “S” figures appear in a different color than the “2″ figures do.

Above my own version on a synesthesia test

Above is a synesthesia test

Becoming Mary Ellen ButeGDNM

Is It Possible To Be Colour blind And Have Synesthesia?I found myself questioning the question above, I wondered if this could be possible, and it was. There is at least one color blind synesthete on record who reported that she could see colors in numbers that she couldn’t see in the real world; referring to them as “martian colors”.

After looking into colour blindness and people who see in monochrome, I made an experiment with the alphabet. Each letter having a different colour to represent it, so its like a code alphabet and you have to try and work out what the colours say. The second row of colours where colour picked from a colour blind test, and the bottom colours are a monochrome version of the normal colours at the top. This was just an experiment to show how some people with synesthesia may see there alphabet.

Above right: close ups of alphabetAbove: is a synesthesia code test

Becoming Mary Ellen ButeGDNM

Playing With LightsRay McAllister sees music: “A bright flash of lavender getting dimmer and dimmer; now we’re going over a pink staircase, some lavender violins.” McAllister describes it as a “Fantasia-”like experience: “Explosions of color all over the place.

Ispiered by this experience i started to look at light photography, i wanted to try and recreate flashes of light to represent what someone with synesthesia may see.

Above: Light experiments

Becoming Mary Ellen ButeGDNM

Do We Unconsciously Relate Colours To Letters?Above is a questionnaire that i devised to see if people unconsciously related colours to letters when given the choice of 2 colours, i tried to relate one of the colours for each option to the letter in question. For example i put a yellow square for the letter “Y” to see if people would relate the colour to the letter because the word “yellow” begins with “Y”

Overall my results do answer my question, “Do people unconsciously relate colour to letters?” I can see from my results that there are certain colours that people chose for each letters, for example blue was chosen for “B” lemon was chosen for “L” mint was chosen for “M” yellow was chose for “Y” and so on…

Above: QuestionnaireLeft: Part of pie chart results

Becoming Mary Ellen ButeGDNM

Invisible ColoursA quick experiment to see what would happen if you overlay a red filter on top of different coloured letters. I want to try and show how people with Synesthesia see certain things that we can’t see, as its almost invisible to us. Like the 2 and 5 test, people with synesthesia can see the shapes straight away where as people without synesthesia can’t.

As you can see from the images below, the lighter colours disappear when you put a red overlay on top, this is because those colours are closer to the red spectrum, where as the darker colours are further away so they become more clearer.

From this experiment i decided to create a poster not to show a visual representation of what a person with synesthesia would see when they look at it, but an experiment to show how some words stand out more to people with synesthesia.

Above: Red overlayMiddle: Test PosterRight: Final Poster