What type of Synesthesia (or APD) do you have?

Side Room
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I have:

Oh shit! there’s a quiz…

Info on APD:

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I’d say I have timbre color/shape with music that I make, but I have figurative images when I’m listening to other people’s music.

It’s weird for my own music to be more abstract to me than other people’s but that lines up with my experience. Perhaps that’s why I’m a good ME, but I don’t perceive my own music as being as good as other people’s - because I can’t get the same experience from it. At least not while I’m working on it. Some of my older stuff is far enough away now that I can get the figurative images from it, though I know it has other legitimate issues that I wouldn’t let into my music today.

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I don’t think I have any of these.

Whenever I take those bullshit ‘musical IQ’ tests I’m usually off the chart (not to be confused with regular IQ, where I’m average as fuck), but I don’t think I have any form of synesthesia at all.

I think I have a very high sensitivity to sound though, probably due to ASD. I think it does more harm than good most of the time, because really small details can become major details and vice versa, but knowing that kind of helps a little.

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I wonder if you have the same issue:

While I work on a new piece of music, I don’t mind listening to parts of it hundreds of time while it is in progress (as necessary to complete the song). If it’s good and what I’m working on moves me, it can be a very pleasant experience. When my wife asks: “how can you listen to the same parts on repeat for hours and not be totally over it?”, I just reply “I don’t mind… and if it becomes too much, I’ll just stop for a day or two before getting back to it”.

Yet, when it is fully mixed and mastered, I barely ever listen to it again.

This means that I don’t really listen to my finished albums at all. When I happen to randomly do, I’m usually pleasantly surprised that it’s better music than I thought it was. But somehow, it feels “wrong” listening to my own music, as if it makes me, I don’t know, vain, maybe…?

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That’s not how it is for me. I don’t have anyone looking over my shoulder as I work in headphones and my family leaves me alone, so IDK if I’m listening to stuff a lot when I work on it.

For me, the experience is very different listening to someone else’s music than my own, but I’d say in a more positive way. Like, I don’t think my stuff is better than anyone else’s, but it tickles a different part of my brain and I see things when I listen to my music that I don’t get from anyone elses. There are times where I don’t mean to, but I sit and listen to my old songs for hours.

Now, that difference between other music and my own is that mine is more abstract. I don’t know why that is, maybe because I literally watched it get made, but I don’t see a story unfold when I listen to my music, just shapes and colors. Other people’s music, I picture more complete scenes and ideas when I hear it. I don’t know if that’s a reflection of the fact that my music itself is a less complete composition, or some different part of my brain knows too much about the music because I made it first hand so I get a different picture.

This is part of why I enjoy mastering so much, I get to see the complete picture and just sharpen up a few of the colors and lines. But I get to have that pretty clear picture from the start that I don’t have to disturb.

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Well I also use headphones 95% of the time - my wife would kick me out of the apartment if I didn’t :grimacing:

She knows I’m on the same parts for hours because I’ve told her how it works.

Actually, I do totally relate to this. If I start listening to my stuff, I find things that I don’t find elsewhere, and as you said, it’s not a question of being “better” - more like it’s “more adapted” to what I’m looking for in music, I guess. So when I do listen to my stuff, I tend to get fully immersed in it. I am not interested in listening to it as background music while I’m doing something else.

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they are usually trash. even the mental health ones you take from your health provider… yeah I usually get calls from them immediately like “ARE YOU OK DON’T DO IT YOU HAVE SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR SUCH AS PAYING US YOUR PREMIUM”

Haha yeah I didn’t even take the quiz, I don’t need to. I’m very in touch with it at this point, and it’s been happening since I was a baby apparently. Sometimes it certainly does more harm than good but it’s not really something I’d try to “fix” (like with meds), but rather learn to live with. Basically I am Daredevil. Nah I’m kidding, I certainly don’t have it to as high of a degree as some people I know.

I only have just begun my journey learning about my possible/likely APD (auditory processing disorder). We can talk about that in this thread too because that subject interests me/is relevant to me.

I’ve learned that I have to use my echoic memory constantly and I never realized how much effort it is for me to have a conversation with someone in person when there’s a bunch of other sounds happening around. How the fuck did I bartend for so long?

It’s crazy how much shit like this helps me concentrate but I am open to finding higher quality music 160-180 bpm isochronic music like this like this because it’s pretty generic.

Edit: I was quite medicated when I wrote this so I’ve had to go back and make several edits lmao

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:rofl:

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Well I don’t have a disorder of synesthesia but some letters, numbers and words related to time have colors to me, sometimes from a childhood memory or sometimes they just do (like the months have certain colors because of a calendar the classroom had in Pre-K. But the letter A is red, B is medium blue, C is orange because it just is) and when I listen to songs they remind me of certain colors most of the time from the song cover but sometimes they just have it. For example, Answer by Kanako Hoshino is white and gold when the singer said it reminded her of red and the album it was in has white and holo rainbow colors. However, something like Saikyo Stronger will be red and white to me becayse that’s the cover art’s colors.

On rare cases certain images will have bad smells to me and the bad smell won’t go away until I click off the image. One time on Pinterest I had a board of a show I liked (it’s TV-Y7 so nothing gross at all) and wanted to put the cover image as one of the photos but for some reason despite being perfectly SFW and not disgusting whatsoever I had a bad smell from it and it wouldn’t go away until I made another image as the thumbnail. It was upsetting because I like that show.

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If we’re going to broaden it, have I ever told you guys about how massively screwed up the number line is in my head? Buckle up because this will be a trip. Remember through all this I’m an accountant by the way, so mine and other people’s paychecks depend on this thing making sense to me.

So, number line. More of a number map for me. It IS a line, but it’s like a drunk scribbled on a wall.

Starting at 0, we go right to about 20, then the numbers start to curve down, gently at first. Then around 100, it turns to grids of 10 and keeps going down like that to about 10000. Then at 10000 they start to curve back to the left. Still in grids of 10, but now subdivided so that each line fits 100, but it still reads like 10. Btw, if you count down from the higher numbers, the grids go all the way to 10, and then you get a line back to zero.

By about 50k, we’re straight up going to the left. For the most part, we’re so zoomed out that the numbers aren’t really organized in a grid anymore. If you look close enough they are, but it’s kind of more like shaped noise. Keep going left to around 750k, then they start to slope down and will continue to vary between left and down to infinity.

So, negative numbers, I only have to like 200. They go left to -20 and then in their grids of 10 UP (as in the opposite of where the grids go for positive numbers) to the end. If I need bigger negative numbers than that, I just think of them as positive numbers with a minus sign, and they come to an area somewhere above -200 when I’m using them, then literally disappear when I’m done.

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Damn, as someone with almost no mind’s eye at all (aphantasia, I think it’s called?), this sounds pretty intriguing.

Do most people working with numbers and math all day have a pretty decent ability to visualize where numbers sit in relation to one another, or like a lookup table? I don’t even think I can imagine even a normal version of this, but I’m surprised that you’ve figured a way around yours. This seems like a neighborhood when you’re 100 Cool Lane and your neighbors are all like 500 and 900!

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I’ve never really looked into it, tbh…

When I hear sounds or ambience I don’t really “feel” or “see” them per-se, but I can sense them with my whole body. It’s like they have form. Something like a low pitched sine note is large and solid, it fills up space, etc. A higher pitched saw wave isn’t really pointy or sharp, but rather thin and something I can “punch through?” With uncomfortable sounds I feel like there’s something around me that’s not right. Sometimes I get blinded and deafened by sharp or rough sounds because they “obscure” me.

Tbh I sound pretty fucking out there right now - I’ll never be able to effectively describe my mental scenarios, lol.

Frequency ranges have certain flavours to me. Sub bass is umami, bass is salty, low and center mids are sweet, high mids are rather bland and/or dry, and anything above that is spicy…

I have a big sweet tooth :sweat_smile:

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I don’t usually talk about my number map. IDK, as I was typing it out I had deja vu, so maybe I have talked about it here before. I don’t know if that’s a common thing among accountants or not. I’ll try and bring it up next time I’m around some others and see if they let me keep my license or not.

Oh, forgot to mention, sometimes when I use large negative numbers, for some reason parts of the map rotate so that that large number over -200 can be on the left. IDK why, it doesn’t always happen, just sometimes. That is a bit of a trip.

Decimals and fractions are a cloud around zero btw, you have to reach into the cloud and it’s like picking out a dust speck to get the right decimal.

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I think most people develop visualizations that sometimes help get your head around things. I’d guess the number line is really a holdover from how math is taught in schools; it’s a pretty basic tool to demonstrate negative numbers and fractions early on and it just sticks with people. Then it gets expanded on with another axis and you get basic Euclidian geometry, so it keeps getting reinforced.

Visualization is really about developing intuition or insight for a system. Once you build up that intuition I think their usefulness falls off. I personally don’t need a number line in my head to compare two numbers any more than I need a calculator to figure out 2+2 - at some point you just know it and get on with things. Whether there’s some behind-the-scenes lookup table at play, I don’t know, but I’m not usually imagining a line when I’m thinking about numbers. Maybe others do, I can’t say I’ve ever asked.

Everything’s done on computers anyway. A database dumps more numbers than anyone could hold in their head, does shit with them and makes you a graph that a 10 year old would understand. If you grok the mathematics of 6-dimensional manifolds, it’s pretty easy to have a computer compute one, project it into three dimensions and let you play with it while it recalculates on the fly. You don’t really need to internally visualize much of anything anymore because for better or worse we have tools to do it for us.

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I was under the impression that this is relatively normal. I wasn’t always this way, but once I’ve create a music thing that began as an emotional expression of my tortured soul, then sculptured every single aspect of it to the shape and color of my liking, then dissected it fully, reverse engineered it to disperse its instrumental parts into future live performances, and then released it… that brief moment where I controlled air pressure and molecules on record is no longer my precious and it belongs to the world now.

BUT she’s still my HO and you KNOW i pimp her out because I want that paper son! talkin that mad skrilla playa! lol what I mean is, once it’s out, my relationship with the work changes into a business one. depending on its perceived value in the open market so to speak.

I don’t listen to my own music very much post-release except analytically or nostalgically (it fills my gratification tank with emotions of success in knowing that “Me Then” compared to “Me Now” has matured, upgraded, grown, learned, progressed, improved, leveled up – and self-analyzation of drawing-the-lines/connecting-the-dots between my varying phases of musicality is a fun thing to do, sure. However, no, my music composition and song-writing in the moment or within the project deadline, that is an expression of things I am feeling RIGHT NOW, while I’m writing it. Once I’ve packaged it up and given it to the world, it’s y’all’s now, I no longer own it exclusively.

The feeling I never get over though is that it floods my soul with joy to see people affected in any kind of way by my music, pulled or pushed or touched emotionally by it, of course! but nah, I like to listen to what i am (or other people are) making now rather then back then… it’s like reading a journal entry over and over, no thanks. Whatever I’m doing now, that’s the goodie-goodie, cuz that’s when it’s relevant. Me Then was a novice compared to Me Now! I can’t wait till I’m as good as Me Later!

And it’s not sweeping, sometimes I’ll play my whole discography and give myself props for choosing art creation over breaking things or self-destruction

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For numbers I have some colors

1: Red
2: Light blue
3: Orange
4: Dark blue
5: Red
6: Purple
7: Lime green
8: Medium blue
9: Red
10: Red

Not sure why red repeats a lot

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Yep, same here. That is an amazing feeling. I usually don’t really know what to say when someone is very enthusiastic about something I’ve made, but I’m certainly grateful my humble music lives with them for a little while, and maybe helps create memories in their lives.

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I’ve learned to face a compliment with gratitude and humility and genuinely thank the person for taking the time and that it means a lot to me and the sort of love is the top reason I love music in the first place then I ask if they have $3 i can borrow for the bus

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fascinating. are able to specifically define the type of “medium” blue (for example) with a close hex color code or is it too instantaneous? for me the color auras occasionally will flood my vision like a photo filter. it’s not always good timing, like if I’m driving or something.

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2 is #00b6ff, 4 is #0023ff, and 8 is #0085ff for me

(These are estimations)

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