Millie Artist Profile

Millie Bushell
Age: 20
East London
Synaesthesia type: sound-colour, letter-colour, visuospatial-time

Paragraph detailing your experience of having synaesthesia:

Although I didn’t realise what I experienced had a name, I first realised my brain processed things differently when I was about 11 years old, during a singing lesson. As the teacher was playing scales on the piano, she played a low, ‘ugly, sludgy brown’ note, which I asked her not to play again, explaining how unpleasant it looked and made me feel. Confused, she asked me to clarify, and I explained, “well, you know how middle C is red…”. This, of course confused her further, so we spent the rest of the lesson going through notes and chords to find out their colours. Music plays out like a visual lights and colour display. It’s dynamic, it moves and flashes, it’s vibrant, and it is part of the experience of music for me. I can’t imagine sound without colour and it makes me uncomfortable to think about. It’s not usually a distraction, taking place in my periphery or almost like a screen in my mind. Occasionally, it’s a fully immersive experience and I can’t focus on anything else. I desperately want people to understand, so sometimes if a piece of music particularly captures me, I paint and use mixed mediums to try to represent what I can see. There are frustrating limitations to this, as paintings are more like fixed snapshots or general overviews and often fail to capture the most beautiful momentary flashes of light, colour or texture. I also can’t replicate or induce a sensation. If there’s pulling, squeezing, scratching, I can’t convey that onto canvas. The most frustrating limitation though, is ‘Martian’ colours. These are colours that don’t exist. Colours that I see but can’t create because they aren’t on the visual light spectrum often cause gaps in my paintings which I have to fill with whatever colour I feel best replicates or fits with the rest of the music. I can’t even describe them.
Since discovering sound-colour synaesthesia, I’ve questioned and been questioned on other types of sensory overlap, leading me to discover that no, not everyone believes ‘x’ is lime green, and that understanding the concept of time in a spatial arrangement that extends like a receipt roll all around the space I’m in, isn’t ‘normal’. When people ask, I try to be as descriptive as I can so that they can understand my perception, and potentially figure out if they have it too. I’ve only met one other synaesthete, so despite knowing I’m not alone having read other people’s experiences, read research and spoken to people researching it, I do feel a bit strange vocalising it. The way I experience things is totally normal to me, like it is for anyone, and you don’t question things until someone questions you.

(This could include when you first realised that you had synaesthesia, examples of connections that you experience, do certain things intensify your synaesthesia more than others? do you enjoy having synaesthesia/see it as something that enhances your life? If you feel that you have anything additional to add that could aid a non-synaesthete in understanding your experience)