The Synesthesia Archives

Full Album (43:47)

This project started as a filing system before it became an album. I have occasional Synesthesia; I hear color. I have for as long as I can remember, a sound arrives, and a hue arrives with it, uninvited, exact, fitting, to my ears. For years I treated that as background noise to my own life until I learned what it actually is.

I previously developed a project in this vein:

This time I decided to deep dive into a few specific data/colors/sounds. So, sixteen entries. Sixteen exact hex values, each one logged the way you’d log a specimen, precise and cross-referenced against whatever sound my ear insisted belonged to it. Some pairings might also feel obvious to you once you hear them, but odds are your perception is yours whereas mine is mine.

I built the track sequence (synced to the “album cover” image) to move like a spectrum into a kind of gilded static, dunes into unnatural green, brine into velvet dark, before it drifts into the metallics, the voids, the glitch tones at the edges of the palette. Track to track, the goal wasn’t melody progression in the usual sense. It was closer to specimen order, organizing a private sensory archive so someone outside my head could potentially walk through it in sequence and feel the shape of the whole collection.

I’m not expecting anyone to see/hear what I see/hear. Synesthesia is famously ungeneralizable, so your #FF00FF almost certainly isn’t my #FF00FF. What I’m sharing instead is a notebook of sorts, with sixteen entries, faithfully transcribed, in the subjective order I filed them.

Press play. Cross-reference your own instincts against mine. Where we disagree, you’re probably right, for you.

– JJ

The Organic Sequence (according to yours truly)

01 #FF4500 (Orange-Red, Combustion)

02 #FFD700 (Gold, Gilded Static)

03 #F0E68C (Khaki, Shifting Dunes)

04 #7FFF00 (Chartreuse, Unnatural Energy)

05 #00FF41 (Matrix Green, Binary Growth)

06 #00FFFF (Cyan, Oxygen Rich)

07 #002366 (Royal Blue, Deep Brine)

08 #4B0082 (Indigo, Velvet Darkness)

09 #E6E6FA (Lavender, Weightless Mist)

10 #FF00FF (Magenta, Electric Sting)

11 #FF69B4 (Hot Pink, Artificial Joy)

12 #704214 (Sepia, Earth Dust)

13 #2F4F4F (Dark Slate, Petrochemical)

14 #808080 (Slate, Concrete Foundation)

15 #FFFFF0 (Ivory, Porcelain Breath)

16 #000000 (Pure Black, Absolute Zero)