Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a neurological disorder in which the experience of one sense motivates an involuntary association with another sense. Those who experience synaesthesia, known as synesthetes, are able to either perceive letters or numbers as inherently colour, hear movement, or – in probably the best-known cases of the disorder – see music in the form of colours and/or associative shapes. There are many occurrences of synaesthesia in books, television and film. Synaesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. While cinema is predominantly referred to and conceived of as a visual medium, even since the silent era it has been, in fact, almost always audiovisual. But in watching films, the prioritization of our senses automatically privileges the images over the sound. The sound, in fact, seems to serve the image, and hardly the other way around: we see actors’ lips move, so we hear them speak in synchronization, and film music typically operates invisibly, seemingly existing only to serve in a way that accentuates the images and elicit corresponding emotion. In the most typical experiences of mainstream film, this interpretation is, for the most part, true. Even those of us who have seen a great many films struggle if we try to focus on the sound alone the separation of sound and Foley effects, the intonations of dialogue, the function of music in providing motif, emotion, and theme while the image itself is readily available to and thus, more easily interpretable for our senses. But there are some exceptions to this, and some cases in which film sound and, for the purposes of this post, specifically film music resides equally at the forefront of our senses alongside the image if not surpassing it. This operates most often, it seems, in cases where previously existing music is used, be it classical or pop, rather than the original score. In such cases, the images are often manifested from the music itself rather than using the music for the purpose of the image. Music in such cases acts for the filmmaker as the stimulation of an additional sense; it inspires the nature of the corresponding image. In several scenes from the Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille, Remy expresses different flavours with music and visual symbols across the screen. In The War of the Worlds, Martians may have the ability to smell colours.