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Infinite Synesthesia

Name: Infinite Synesthesia - Bond 500 Champagne
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Taste and synaesthesia – a post-script

Published on 21st Jan 2022Leave a comment

As a post-script to my last post (pun intended!) Zheyi, who produces the synaesthetic wine-art, has drawn my attention to a sommelier who also sees colours with wine (although as I read it he doesn’t turn this into art). You can read about this here. Given the response I’ve had I suspect that this is more common than we may realise. What Zheyi felt was particularly interesting with this is that the sommelier has some similar colour responses to her – notably the association of yellow through to orange with high acidity in wine.

There is probably an interesting research project on this, to establish if particular structural elements of wine produce common synaesthetic responses, or if the association is merely haphazard.

Taste and synaesthesia

. The three wines were the following, each with their associated visual interpretation

The wine’s structure is key to what she is doing initially, much more than aromatic character. Colour and shapes represent her feelings; she sees them but they need time to come together. As a result the pictures are not painted instantly and she will taste and retaste the wines over three to five days. She tastes the opened wine immediately for an instant reaction and then carries on over subsequent days. Consequently the picture is in part a response to the evolution of the wine in contact with the air. Zheyi has been trained to taste systematically (using the Wine and Spirit Education Trust approach) but in painting she is not representing a structured, logical, professional analysis of the wine so much as a personal, subjective response. Thus, for Zheyi, the champagne shows abundance, fruitfulness and early autumn harvests – not acidity, mousse, sugar and the like.

Each picture has its own physical starting point on the canvas. The place on the canvas where she begins is part of the vision – but she can offer no logic about why it commences there – it’s just the feeling. The sections of the painting then evolve, and the response to the wine becomes more and more subtle. Note that the texture of paint, added on later and thickened, is part of the response. It doesn’t come across in the photos I’ve included so much, but the pictures often have dense layers of nuanced colour

Category MOVIE TRAILER TASTING QUOTES

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The perception tends to be of one single colour, or two at the most. When two colours are perceived they are normally in some kind of pattern (a red base with green dots at the top, for example). Alternatively, in the case of song-colour, while the person is listening to the song it might start off as one colour and then transform into the another to reflect some kind of change in the nature of the music: from the verses to the chorus, for example, or the part that is sung and the instrumental part.

It is considered a type of chromesthesia, which is a general name that can be given to any type of synesthesia where the inducer is sound or music and the concurrent is (or includes) colour. Alternatively, and more frequently perhaps, if the colour is evoked by the concept of the song or genre rather than by actually listening to its sounds, it can be considered a type of coloured sequence synesthesia.

What triggers the colour is the general impression received from the song, genre, etc., for any of the following reasons (and perhaps others):

The atmosphere it suggests

The emotion it evokes

Its most dominant aspect, e.g. the timbre of the main instrument or unique features of the singer’s voice

A technical aspect of the song (rhythm, tempo, etc.)

The key the song is in, which might in turn give rise to an atmosphere or an emotion

The concept of the type of music, rather than the sound (in this case we would be talking about a case of coloured sequence synesthesia rather than auditory synesthesia)

In any case it is a highly consistent type of synesthesia: the same song, musical genre, singer etc. always triggers the same colour or combination of colours.

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