Tasteful Turntable

Nikolaj and Lars Kynde are two Danish sound artists/composers who are both obsessed with synesthetic experiences: in what way does music influence our smell, taste and sight, for example?

In their work Tasteful Turntable, their interest in the synesthetic is very clear. In an intimate setting, four participants take place at a low, rotating dinner table. Different peculiar looking bites rotate by on the table, while participants privately listen to corresponding compositions. The sounds create an “aural spicing” to the food.

When a light is cued, the participants simultaneously take a bite and put it into their mouth. The ritual this creates joins the participants together. The internal experience however, that of the fusion of what one tastes and hears, is a private experience.

Tasteful Turntable is one of the few projects that works with synesthetic experiences. A field which artists are just starting to explore, or so it seems. Research on the topic is also scarce. A very good theoretical review article, which I’ve used myself in the past when composing for taste, is Crossmodal Correspondences Between Sounds and Taste by Klemens Knöferle and Charles Spence. Let’s hope we see loads of projects with unexpected synesthetic experiences in the near future!

Sounds Like Silver

Synaesthesia is the neurological phenomenon in which the brain mixes up the senses; stimulation of one of the senses leads to experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. For “Sounds Like Silver”, Kevin Blake worked with a group of three people with sound to colour induced synaesthesia, documenting and illustrating the visual experiences of the group upon hearing his composition. The work explores the concept of synaesthesia being both a blessing and a curse, and explores visual spaces that are both real and surreal. It was completed as part of a thesis exploring the use of “Synaesthesia as a Creative Tool” - for the Music and Media Technologies Masters Degree at the Trinity College of Dublin.

As the work is based on direct input of the test group, the visual aesthetics of the piece might be hard to pin down, though it is definitely interesting to see a representation of what people with synaesthesia experience. What do you think? Is the video a good visual representation of the composition?