What It’s Like Listening To Music As An Autistic Person With Synesthesia
“That chord sounds icy blue, it must be a B.”, “That chord sounds really sparkly!”, “That guitar sounds very sparkly.”, “This song sounds like a train shutting down”…
These are all examples of what you’d probably hear if you witnessed me listening to music. When I listen to music, I don’t hear music only, which is all thanks to me having synesthesia. Some people hear only music when they listen to it. In my case, I’ll hear patterns, shapes, colors, and even textures. My brain is always at work doing some kind of shit, until I go to sleep (even when I go to sleep, it takes some time before my mind stops racing) pretty much.
Having synesthesia makes music-listening more enjoyable for me in a sense. I love being able to listen to a song I like, and then seeing a practical light show going on in my mind’s eye. I love being able to sense certain textures and being able to tell whether a song (or a certain part of a song) is rough, bumpy, smooth, and so on, and I love being able to get certain kinds of imagery in my head as well. For example, one time I was messing around on guitar, and was experimenting with a tone I came up with. To me, it sounded like a river of caramel or maple syrup for some reason.
The combination of me having synesthesia and being autistic just makes listening to music so fucking pleasing for me. Being autistic makes me often stim while listening to music because of the happiness music makes me feel in general. Then, there’s my synesthesia that makes me hear all sorts of colors, shapes, patterns, textures, imagery, and so on. Listening to music is one of my favorite things to do because of what it’s like for me as a neurodivergent person.
Listening to music while having synesthesia also assists me when learning songs on guitar by ear. I can be listening to a song, and can recognize certain chords based on the textures, colors, etc that I already associate with them. Instead of recognizing a chord by just the sound, I can recognize that chord by how my synesthesia makes me recognize it, be it a texture, color, and/or pattern.
In conclusion, not only does having synesthesia make listening to music more enjoyable for me personally, it’s also beneficial to some degree.
