Synaesthesia Art: When Senses Cross and Paintings Sound Like Music

When Wassily Kandinsky attended a concert of Arnold Schoenberg's music in Munich on January 2, 1911, he saw something most people in the audience did not. The music produced colors in his mind. He went home and painted Impression III (Concert) that same night, translating the sound of Schoenberg's atonal compositions into yellow, black, and blue shapes on canvas. Kandinsky was a synaesthete, one of the estimated 4 percent of people whose sensory pathways cross involuntarily. For him, sound produced color. He spent his career trying to paint what he heard.

Synaesthesia art is art made by artists who experience synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimulating one sensory pathway involuntarily triggers experiences in another. The most common form relevant to visual art is chromesthesia, or "colored hearing," where sounds produce experiences of color. A painter with chromesthesia does not choose to associate a musical note with a color. The color appears automatically and consistently when the sound is heard. Synaesthesia art is not art about synaesthesia as a concept. It is art made by people whose perceptual experience of the world is genuinely cross-sensory, and whose work reflects that experience.

This entry covers what synaesthesia is, how it relates to art, the history of synaesthetic artists from Kandinsky to the present, and how contemporary research has changed our understanding of the condition.

What Is Synaesthesia and How Does It Affect Art?

Synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon, not a metaphor. When a synaesthete hears a C-major chord and sees yellow, the yellow is as real to them as the sound. The condition is involuntary, automatic, and consistent over time. The same sound will produce the same color experience years apart. It is also bidirectional in some synaesthetes: sounds produce colors, and colors can produce sounds. An estimated 4 percent of the population experiences some form of synaesthesia.

The most common form is grapheme-color synaesthesia, where letters or numbers appear in specific colors. For visual artists, the most relevant form is chromesthesia, where sounds, music, or everyday noises produce experiences of color, shape, and sometimes texture or motion. Not all synaesthetes are artists, and not all artists who use cross-sensory imagery are synaesthetes. The distinction matters. A painter who chooses to associate blue with a cello is making an artistic decision. A painter who sees blue when a cello plays is reporting a perceptual experience.

Research published by Dr. Jamie Ward at University College London in 2006 found that vision and hearing are inextricably interlinked in everyone's brain, but only synaesthetes are conscious of the crossover. Ward asked six synaesthetes to draw and describe their visual experiences of music played by the New London Orchestra. A control group of six non-synaesthetes did the same. When the resulting images were shown to over 200 visitors at the Science Museum in London, respondents consistently chose the images drawn by synaesthetes as the best match to the music. This suggests that even non-synaesthetes can sense the crossover between sound and vision, though they do not experience it consciously. The research is described at Phys.org.

History and Key Artists

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Kandinsky is the most famous synaesthetic artist in history. He is widely regarded as the pioneer of abstract painting, and his synaesthesia was central to his move toward abstraction. A study published in the journal Multi-Sensory Research by A. Ione and C. Tyler examined Kandinsky's primary writings, including On the Spiritual in Art (1911), Point and Line to Plane (1926), and Reminiscences (1913), in light of modern diagnostic criteria for synaesthesia. The study concluded that Kandinsky's synesthetic perceptions were genuine and inborn, not just a theoretical exercise. The genetic dimension of synaesthesia supports this view: Kandinsky's uncle Victor Kandinsky also described having synaesthetic experiences. Read the study at Brill.

Kandinsky's wife Nina wrote that he passionately loved colors from early childhood and claimed to distinguish a particular smell and musical sound for each color. He was a cellist and violinist since childhood, with a well-developed sense of music. His paintings use musical titles: Compositions, Improvisations, and Impressions. Composition VIII (1923, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) is a dense arrangement of circles, lines, and triangles that one synaesthete described as producing "various tones, which changed as my eyes travelled round the picture." Kandinsky's goal was to make visual art more like music: more abstract, more direct in its emotional impact, and less dependent on recognizable subject matter.

David Hockney (b. 1937)

David Hockney has described experiencing synaesthesia in which music produces colors. His stage designs for operas, including productions at the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, have been influenced by his synesthetic perception of music. Hockney's synaesthesia is less central to his easel painting than Kandinsky's was to his, but it has shaped his approach to color and his work for the stage, where the translation of sound into visual form is the explicit goal.

Contemporary Synaesthetic Artists

A new generation of synaesthetic artists has emerged in the 21st century, many of whom use social media to share their work and explain their perception. Jack Coulter, a Belfast-born painter, experiences sound as color so intensely that as a child he saw bursts of color when listening to his own heartbeat. He paints in real time during musical performances, including a 2018 collaboration with the London Chamber Orchestra where he painted backstage during a performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, projected via livestream to Cadogan Hall. His works have been collected by Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish, and Elton John. His debut solo show at Sotheby's London included QR codes linking each canvas to the corresponding song. Read about his work at AATONAU.

Shane Guffogg, an American artist based in California, presented an exhibition at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale titled At the Still Point of the Turning World, held at the historic Scala Contarini del Bovolo. Guffogg "hears" colors and collaborated with pianist Anthony Cardella and AI programmer Jonah Lynch to translate his paintings into musical compositions. The AI program drew inspiration from Guffogg's brushstrokes and movements, producing music composed essentially by the paintings themselves. The exhibition used augmented reality to let visitors see the paintings move in rhythmic patterns. Read about the exhibition at designboom.

Sarah Kraning, a Minneapolis-born painter, has auditory-visual synaesthesia in which each pitch corresponds to a specific color on the visible spectrum. She paints music in real time, creating large-scale works during live concerts. Her collaborations include work with Warner Records, Lollapalooza, and the Montclair Museum. She has been compared to a modern-day Kandinsky and has painted music for artists including RUFUS DU SOL, Perry Farrell, and the Jonas Brothers. Read about her work at sarahkraning.com.

Kirsty Matheson, a Glasgow-based double bassist and painter, sees colors in response to music, numbers, letters, voices, and even the sound of a car door shutting. She teaches at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and has been commissioned to paint operas, including a triptych for Martyn Brabbins based on Janacek's The Makropulos Affair. She describes her paintings as not interpretations of music but as what the music looks like to her when she hears it. Read about her work at Glasgow Times.

Related Concepts and Terms

Synaesthesia art overlaps with several related concepts. Visual music is the broader category of art that translates sound into visual form, whether or not the artist has synaesthesia. The Pythagorean quest to assign a particular color to each musical note, dating to the 6th century BCE, is an early example of systematic color-sound correspondence. The composer Alexander Scriabin, who was likely a synaesthete, designed a "color organ" for his 1915 symphony Prometheus: The Poem of Fire that would project colors synchronized with the music. Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Vladimir Nabokov also described synesthetic experiences.

Neuroaesthetics, the scientific study of aesthetic perception, has taken an interest in synaesthesia as a window into how the brain processes cross-sensory information. Research by Semir Zeki and others at University College London has used brain imaging to study what happens in the brain of synaesthetes when they experience Kandinsky's paintings. The goal is to understand how vision and hearing are linked in all brains, not just synaesthetic ones.

Synaesthesia art is distinct from participatory art and immersive art, though some synaesthetic artists create immersive installations that attempt to give non-synaesthetes a sense of the cross-sensory experience. Guffogg's Venice exhibition used AR and AI to let visitors see paintings move and hear them translated into music, which is a form of immersive translation of synesthetic perception.

See Synaesthesia Art in Person

The largest collection of Kandinsky's work is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which holds Composition VIII (1923) and many other works from his series of Compositions, Improvisations, and Impressions. The Centre Pompidou in Paris also holds a significant Kandinsky collection. For contemporary synaesthetic art, Jack Coulter's work has been exhibited at Sotheby's London, and Shane Guffogg's 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition demonstrated the integration of synaesthetic painting with AI and AR technology.

For more on the science of perception and art, read our entry on neuroaesthetics. For the broader category of art that translates sound into visual form, see visual music. And for a related contemporary practice, read about participatory art, where the audience completes the work through their engagement.