This page contains all the readers’ comments on the “Motion-to-sound” article, received between 2022 and 2026.
Comment by schillerborld. January 17, 2022 at 5:58 AM
what if it´s vice versa? I can feel sound like movements but
visual... this is strange to explain. closing eyes, hear sound and than it s
like seeing the sounds in waves and forms, but more like touching or feeling
them.... hope it s enough as base info
Reply by: Pau (The Synesthesia Tree author). January 17,
2022 at 8:44 PM
I believe that what you describe would be classified as
belonging to auditory-visual synesthesia, as for many synesthetes the
"visual" experience is actually somewhere between "seeing"
and "feeling", movement and direction can be an important part of the
perception, and waves and shapes/lines (without colour) are certainly a
possible concurrent. There is a lot of variety in auditory-visual, with
different synesthetes having quite different experiences. https://www.thesynesthesiatree.com/2021/02/auditory-visual-synesthesia.html
Reply by: Anonymous. February 3, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Yes, I experience something like this too. I feel sound in
my body as movement. My body tracks sound with an extra strong vigilance,
tracing each sound into lines and movements I can feel inside. I call it
"taking each sound too seriously" because I have not yet figured out
how to turn it down or off. Believe me I've tried. Earplugs help. But overall,
I feel like my auditory sense is turned up on overdrive. I have enjoyed making
abstract art based on sounds and felt sense from sounds. But this quality I have
makes listening to live music complicated and challenging. It's not pleasurable
and it feels like a lot of work for me. I can enjoy live music if it's one
instrument and one voice. My body follows every sound and tracks it in my body.
I can see a small band play but it's tiring and I often space out and miss a
lot of the music I think because my system gets flooded and goes offline. Going
to the symphony completely overwhelms my system and I dissociate over and over,
because my body is tracking each individual instrument and turning it into
felt-sense movement in my body which is super crowded and chaotic. I think if I
could just leap up and do some sort of expressionistic dance (like the
eurythmics method? I am not a dancer) it might release for a bit and perhaps be
pleasurable for a short amount of time. But to be honest, I find layered music
with multiple instruments too stressful to listen to live. I wonder if this is
a type of synesthesia and which one. When I learned of Motion-Sound I thought,
yes! but backwards: Sound-Motion. Sound becomes Motion in my body and I
internalize that motion.
Reply by: Anonymous. July 25, 2025 at 5:44 AM
Sound IS Motion for me, too! I find listening to music
without moving so stressful, but I experience it more pleasently: If the song
fits well together, it is as if it's flowing through my veins, my body parts
become certain instruments. Dancing becomes diffficult, because I try to
express every instrument at once. I get you on the overwhelm, too, especially
in crowds. They are easily so overwhelming
Comment by: Anonymous. January 17, 2024 at 8:43 AM
I can feel every instruments/vocals in every songs (even if
it’s the first time I’ve listen to it). All different parts of my body know
which movements represent that instruments/vocals. It seems like my brain
doesn’t have to think, it’s involuntary. Really hard to explain but it feels
magical every time!!!
Reply by: Anonymous. July 25, 2025 at 5:45 AM
I DIDN'T KNOW OTHER PEOPLE DO THIS WTH
Comment by: Anonymous. May 21, 2024 at 10:51 PM
Years ago, I took a hit of LSD and we heard the intro track
of a hip hop album. When closing your eyes you could see the music form into
colorful shapes that match the pitch and the tone in shapes similar to a
kaleidoscope. Each note gave echoing feelings of pleasure and reverberating
euphoria as if you were on a rollercoaster ride. We played the 1minute song
over and over again....DM
Comment by: Doug McClosky. October 23, 2024 at 1:50 AM
My son has several types of vision to sound synesthesia plus
kinetics to sound. He hears everything involuntarily. Movement to sound, shapes
to sound, flashing (or bright light) to sound, his body movements to sound. He
even hears things like the direction, speed and rotation of tennis balls
mid-flight or the number of times a bird's wings flap...His description is at:
https://mattjazz123.com/process.html#/ .
Reply by: Pau (The Synesthesia Tree author). November 17,
2024 at 4:26 PM
Very interesting! I'll add him to the Tree website on this
page and the synesthete artists page.
Comment by: Anonymous. November 3, 2024 at 7:03 PM
Maybe this one describes me. Blinking lights are loud to me.
It is a pre-sound sound. The noise before a noise happens. And they are
unpleasant. I HATE blinking lights, especially if they go quickly. The quicker
they blink, the noisier they are.
I am hearing, but attend a lot of Deaf chats. I recently
realized how loud they are to me and that I’m struck by an absence of loudness
when I leave the chats. I mean, these chats are often loud enough that I don’t
even hear anything outside of the group. When I leave the group, I am struck by
how quiet they are, and this is overtaken by noise when I rejoin the
conversations. The quality of noise is similar to any other social gathering
where people are talking out loud, but also different at the same time. I find
social gatherings of hearing people to sometimes be overwhelming by how loud
they get, but with the Deaf chats, they are just loud in a different way.
Pre-noise noise. Sound before it happens, but not in an unpleasant way.
Reply by: Anonymous. July 25, 2025 at 5:46 AM
....I am learning a lot about myself
Comment by: Anonymous. July 16, 2025 at 4:16 AM
you know when you go your whole life thinking an experience
you have is normal and that everyone has it, then you realize that it's
actually a hyper-specific experience that is actually a disorder apparently?
... yeah
Reply by: Pau (The Synesthesia Tree author). February 8,
2026 at 9:53 AM
Yes! Synesthesia isn't considered a disorder though: just a
trait. And it's usually considered something neutral or positive.
Comment by: Jeremías López Barrocal. May 17, 2026 at
11:01 PM
This is the closest I've seen to what I see... I'm a music
student from various instruments and musical enviroments, and I see movement in
music -when it's "well made/expressed"- closing my eyes. I see mostly
circular patterns on all sides, and they change and move along with the music.
When something "isn't right" in the song happens something close to a
pause in it, or a stop if it doesn't "get right" soon enough.
I also get music composing itself on my mind most of the
week, especially if I'm not mentally tired, and the times I closed my eyes and
concetrated on expressing mentally that music some good patterns appeared!
I'm studying to become a director some day too, and I think
this could help me a lot; But I need to understand it better first. That's why
I'll just leave this comment to see if you could help me identify this, or at
least know if it is actually a synesthesia!
Reply by: Pau (The Synesthesia Tree author). May 27,
2026 at 6:40 PM
Hi Jeremías, and sorry for the slightly late reply!
I think there are two possible explanations for what you are
describing.
The first is that it might be a kind of auditory-visual
synesthesia, timbre-shape perhaps
(https://www.thesynesthesiatree.com/2021/03/timbre-colour-and-timbre-shape.html).
As you mention that it seems closely linked to the song sounding
"right" and you "mentally expressing" it, then rather than
being strictly auditory-related it might have a connection to emotion as an
inducer, although I think that's less probable. I think it's more likely to be
auditory-visual synesthesia, and as it's fairly mild and not very invasive in
your case you need to relax and focus in order to perceive the circular
patterns, and if you are distracted (by the music not being right or by other
things) then you lose your flow state and wouldn't be as sensitive to them.
The other possible thing that might be happening, rather
than synesthesia, is hypnagogic visualisations, as you mention that it only
happens when you close your eyes. Some people experience these and they appear
visually in the form of bright, sparkling little lights or morphing shapes,
only with closed eyes or in the dark, when the person is in an extremely
relaxed state. This is normally at the moment between sleep and wakefulness,
although for some people they can happen if music, for example, makes them
rapidly enter a deep state of relaxation. If this is the explanation in your
case, and not synesthesia, then the patterns you see would be physically
visible to you behind your closed eyelids, and they would be very bright and
sparkly, rather than more of a "feeling" or in the "mind's
eye" as would probably be the case if you had mild synesthesia.
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