Wednesday, October 19, 2016 // The Statement 
 
7B

by Melina Glusac, Senior Arts Editor
Life is a Mixtape: Living in Color

F

irst, a confession: I’m jealous of 
people with synesthesia, and I 

always have been.

Colours - Grouplove

Ah yes, jealousy of an inborn neuro-

logical phenomenon. All the great love 
stories in the world have spawned from 
it, right?

Definitely not. Not at all. It’s just me.
For those who don’t know, synesthe-

sia is, by super fancy definition in the 
dictionary, “a sensation produced in one 
modality when a stimulus is applied to 
another modality, as when the hearing 
of a certain sound induces the visualiza-
tion of a certain color.” In college-kid 
English: People with synesthesia see a 
letter of the alphabet, or a number, and 
they inherently associate it with a color. 
A is pink, B is green, one is orange and 
two is yellow. Sometimes synesthesia 
extends to the other senses — illogical 
associations involving taste, smell and 
so on — but “grapheme-color synesthe-
sia” (letters, numbers and color) is one 
of the more common forms. I’m char-
treuse with envy. Is it obvious?

Cry to Me - Solomon Burke

A litany of famous artists and musi-

cians have had it. It permeates the 
writing of one of my favorite authors, 
Vladimir Nabokov. His doomed narra-
tor in “Lolita” describes a dilemma in 
a beloved phrase of mine: “And I was 
laughing happily, and the atrocious, 
unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, 
eternal horror that I know now was still 
but a dot of blackness in the blue of my 
bliss … ”

It’s this seizure of broad, airborne 

emotions — horror, happiness, disgust 
— and attaching them to hues, so as to 
enhance our understanding of, well, us, 
that intrigues me most about synesthe-
sia. Our bliss is blue — our horror, a dot 
of blackness on a quilt of cerulean. This 
is how I want to see the world.

Feels Like We Only Go Backwards - 

Tame Impala

Mostly, I’m jealous of synesthetes 

that see and feel colors when they lis-
ten to music. This type of synesthesia is 
called “chromesthesia,” and it comes in 
an array of subforms. What’s notable is 

a lack of consensus surrounding it; there 
is no set “key” to the musical note-color 
pairs. B-flat can be yellow to one person, 
and red to the next— it’s all up to the solo 
synesthete’s mind to make the magical 
link.

At the beginning of fall break, my dad 

came to pick me up. Our drives home are 
a constant source of inspiration for me: 
Dad is a musician with an encyclope-
dic knowledge of music, and there’s no 
one I’d rather fight with for radio con-
trol. I yell at him about Steely Dan, he 
yells at me about Britney Spears, c’est la 
vie. But then we come around and hit a 
sweet spot, like this past Friday on Siri-
us XMU: Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We 
Only Go Backwards.”

I hadn’t heard it in a proper year (one 

of those songs with which I abused the 
replay button and, alas, grew indifferent 
toward), and this time it sounded fuzzy 
and familiar. I looked to my left and 
noticed my dad bathed in titian light, a 
secondhand glow brought about by the 
golden trees to the side of the freeway. 
It was dusk, and they were whirring 

past us at 80 mph, and they made him 
tangerine, the steering wheel mustard, 
the dashboard a mango blur of setting 
sunlight. “Feels Like We Only Go Back-
wards” sounds orange to me now.

“Silver Street (Live)” - Ben Folds 

Five

Last week I was stressed in the Uni-

versity of Michigan Museum of Art, 
trapped in that ivory edifice of aca-
demic sweat, listening to one of the 
only live albums I will actually listen to 
(Ben Folds Live). “Silver Street” came 
on, with its perfect jazz chord progres-
sions and sad-bar-pianist attitude, and it 
calmed me instantly. I thought about the 
silver all around. The metallic sleekness 
of UMMA — the chrome sheen and the 
whites, the stillness of the ivory walls 
and the deep blue of the night sky peek-
ing through their windows. It felt the 
way silver feels. Beautiful, but sharp.

And then I was in that pink-wine-

haze with “Little Bird” by Annie Lennox 
playing, sitting with my housemates at 
the kitchen table and seeing mauve on 

their phone screens, rose-colored pil-
lows on the couch, the smell of 3 a.m. 
“Disco Inferno” feels like red to me now, 
the deep crimson of Solo cups at work 
and the scarlet smiles of my friends and 
coworkers to my left, to my right.

Color is everywhere, but, then again, it 

always has been. And we, as people with 
brains, can make it show itself however 
we want it to, connect it to certain expe-
riences that we want to savor, certain 
songs. Even if these associations aren’t 
innate, like they are with synesthesia 
and those who have it, we can choose to 
notice opportunities for connections to 
occur — and we can let them occur.

The Village - New Order

Then sometimes, for no reason (and 

it’s best if we don’t have one), we can 
hear a rainbow.

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA

