Paul Gordon proposes a new theory of art as synaesthetic and applies this idea to various media, including works--such as movies, illustrated books, and song lyrics--that explicitly cross over into media involving the different senses. The idea of art as synaesthetic is not, however, limited to those "cross-over" works, because even an individual poem or novel or painting calls upon different senses in creating its syn-aesthetic "meaning.” Although previous studies have often devolved into those who see an obvious connection between art and synaesthesia and those who adamantly reject such a notion, Synaesthetics furthers our understanding of synaesthesia as an important, if not essential, component of artistic expression.
A timely book that identifies the practice of '(syn)aesthetics' in artistic style and audience response, which helps to articulate the power of experiential practice in the arts. This exciting new approach includes interviews with leading practitioners in of theatre, dance, site-specific work, live art and technological performance practice.
Paul Gordon proposes a new theory of art as synaesthetic and applies this idea to various media, including works--such as movies, illustrated books, and song lyrics--that explicitly cross over into media involving the different senses. The idea of art as synaesthetic is not, however, limited to those "cross-over" works, because even an individual poem or novel or painting calls upon different senses in creating its syn-aesthetic "meaning.” Although previous studies have often devolved into those who see an obvious connection between art and synaesthesia and those who adamantly reject such a notion, Synaesthetics furthers our understanding of synaesthesia as an important, if not essential, component of artistic expression.
One interesting aspect of vision is the occasional borderline overlap between contrasting sensory perceptions. For instance, we often find transmodal bridges, transitions and interactions between vision and hearing – a perceptual phenomenon known as synaesthesia. Synaesthesia may evoke certain qualities and meanings, simultaneously or in succession: Some humans may see a colour while hearing a particular word; others may hear a specific tone when viewing the colour blue, a plethera of other combinatorial sensory assocations also exist. Synaesthesia resembles this transfer of sensoric qualities and meanings within perceptual modalities of art, music and poetry. Neuroscientific visual imaging has posited certain areas in the brain where this rare mixing of senses may take place. Sound symbolisms and synaesthetic comparisons are widespread throughout literature. Several sensory modalities share qualities such as intensity, brightness or acoustically associated meanings. In this way, methaphors can be relatively freely transmitted between the senses. The Romantic poets interpreted synaesthetic perceptions as borderlines of the senses and described them as transitions between the single faculties of art. They were evidently very interested in these associations. This was different from the reflections of poets of the 18th century, who were interested in the diversities of the faculties of art such as painting, music, poetry. Synaesthesia happens through synchronous combination and concatenation of one sense modality with several other sense modi. This essay proceeds in six steps: It shows how the cooperation of synaesthetic qualia with hidden and multiple meanings has always played a major role for the inner qualities of a picture of art.
What is an ornament? The term has various meanings both in decoration and music. The noun form of the term refers to an object that enhances the appearance of a person or thing. While the verb use of the term describes the act of improvising or adding embellishment to a composition, which is synonymously defined as embellishment in music. For instance, the embellishment of the divine notation was a vital part of the musical experience of the classical period. The ’’Synaesthetic Ornament ’’takes place in an intercontinental setting where the imitative interpretations of late baroque, rococo, neoclassical, and romantic styles are eclectically adapted, additionally, every form is defined as ’’the music of the eyes.’’ By inferring from the historical data the research offers what philosophy could lie behind the idea of combining music and spatial design in the 18th and 19th centuries that inspired artists to define architecture as musical compositions.
Synesthetic design strives to develop products that systematically incorporate all five senses. In future, the current wealth of medical technical insights in psychology, physiology, motor functions, and neurology and the development of innovative materials with astonishing new properties will open up almost unlimited opportunities for the designer’s creativity. Haverkamp brings together for the first time precisely those aspects of this fundamental knowledge that are specifically relevant for designers. The result is a book that offers designers of all schools a clear and well-organized practical handbook and a solid foundation for their own designs.
Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.0, University of Bonn (Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie), course: Language and Cognition, language: English, abstract: As far as possible within its limitations, this paper is going to answer the question whether non-synaesthetic people are able to connect the sense of taste, the auditive, the visual and the tactile sense with each other. While most of the synaesthesia studies focus on visual stimuli like colours or graphemes, this paper is mainly concerned with the auditive sense, represented by phonemes. However, since the visual sense is one of the most important senses for humans, and for the sake of comparability, visual stimuli in form of colours and different shapes are also included in the questionnaire. In order to give the reader a proper overview of the topic, a short literature review, which gives information about the literature that is the base of the paper, can be found in chapter 2. Subsequently, in chapter 3, one finds a description of the methodology on which the research based on: the evaluation of data taken from a questionnaire. The presentation of the results of this research follows in chapter 4 as well as a detailed discussion of these results, which can be found in chapter 5 right in front of the conclusion in chapter 6. Everyone is aware of the fact that the sense of taste is strongly connected with the sense of smell. People, who are due to special circumstances not able to smell properly, often lose their appetite because they cannot really taste the food. But what about the other senses? Is tasting also connected with the visual or the auditive sense, or are there in general connections between other senses than smell and taste? People in a special neurological condition called synaesthesia are able to draw these connections. Ramachandran and Hubbard describe synaesthesia as a “condition, in which an otherwise normal person experiences sensations in one modality when a second modality is stimulated” (Ramachandran/Hubbard 2001:4). This can become obvious in many different, most abstract, ways like the matching of graphemes, letters or numbers, with special colours, colours with sounds or even with (tactile) conditions. But experiments in the past, for example by Wolfgang Köhler, have shown that not only synaesthetic persons but everyone can be able to draw a couple of sensual connections inside the brain. But is this the case for any connection between randomly chosen senses or only for special ones?
Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth. Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, this book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but also how they appropriated it to achieve their own aesthetic, metaphysical, and social goals. Through case studies of prominent multimodal artists—Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Strauss, Aleksandr Scriabin, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Andrei Bely, and Rainer Maria Rilke—At the Crossroads of the Senses reveals the color-forms and color-sounds that, for these artists, laid the foundations of the world and served as the catalyst for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle. Rooted in archival research in France, Germany, Russia, and the Czech Republic, At the Crossroads of the Senses taps overlooked scientific sources to offer a fresh perspective on European modernism. Sensory studies scholars, literary critics, and art and music historians alike will welcome its many contributions, not least among them a refreshing advocacy for a kind of sensuous reading practice.
'Common Minds' presents papers by some of the most eminent philosophers alive today, grappling with some of the themes derived from the larger programme that Pettit has inspired. It concludes with a piece by Pettit himself, in which he gives an overview of his work, and provides commentary on the predecing essays.
