Summer progress

I had great plans for progress over the summer :) However, my idea was certainly still pretty vague and I now see that perhaps my idea wasn't really going to work - it seemed to change daily and I kept losing focus and direction. Along with an incredibly busy summer, which included house sales falling through and an increase in workload left me feeling like perhaps another year of studying would be a bit too much to take on. Although not ideal, reaching this point did allow me to stop getting so hung up on an all singing all dancing bit of software and decide to have a go at really stripping back the idea.  

Synesthesia
This was an area I'd vaguely researched earlier and found of interest. Synesthetes (those who experience Synesthesia) experience automatic, involuntary second senses. There are a range of different types of Synesthesia - one person may experience grapheme-colour synesthesia - where letters and numbers are seen in different colours, another  sound - colour synesthesia whereby the person in question would experience colour/shapes/movement when hearing particular sounds. Synesthesia is a very personal experience, with no synesthetes experiencing the same effects, and from the outside looking in (I can't assume how it feels to each person with the condition), also seems incredibly magical.

Synesthesia in Art
There have been many artists who draw on their synesthesia to create works of art and also art that is intended to evoke feelings of synesthesia.

Terra 606: An Eye Full of Sound is a wonderful animation which explores the experiences of a number of synesthetes.

Whilst I found my research really interesting and inspiring, I still wasn't clear at this stage how this would influence my work.

Sound/Colour association
Historically, many artists and scientists have explored possible associations between sound and colour. The first known experiment was conducted by the Milanese artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo at the end of the sixteenth century and Isaac Newton tried to solve the problem by assuming that musical tones and color tones have frequencies in common (Wikipedia). Whilst I don't feel sufficiently qualified to provide answers to this question, I did want to make colour/sound associations a feature of my work.

BBC Horizon documentary: Do you see what I see