Fun With Synaesthesia: “Song-Stills”
and the Intermingling of the Senses

If you think that music and poetry are different things, then songwriting is an inter-disciplinary art because it uses both disciplines. It is also synaesthetic – where different senses or ways of perceiving blend together. The paintings in my Song-Still series correspond to various songs I have written.

The newest one, Ananya, which corresponds to the song “Tumbleweed” (on Rhythms of Another Life) also evokes the sonic textures of the fully orchestrated and recorded song, whereas the others depict only the song as written on acoustic guitar. (see this collection)

In the series of paintings, the tones and timbres of different musical instruments become colors, visual forms, and palpable textures. Slow melodies become large and languid visual forms while fast melodies become small caffeinated ones.

Different arts seem to use literary metaphors inspired by the full spectrum of the senses to convert meanings into their own languages and to communicate similar meanings. For example, sound engineers, artists, and producers use words like “bright” and “crisp” to describe sound. So Ananya uses yellow with hard edges to depict the crisp and choppy guitar rhythm. (hear the song “Tumbleweed”)

Songwriting became easy for me one day when I understood it as one sense playing together with other senses rather than creating in a vacuum. It was when I saw The Who’s rock opera Tommy at my aunt and uncle’s house, a visit my family remembers for the spaghetti that took notoriously long and we were all faint with hunger. But I just sat there after the film making up songs. The visual easily translated into the aural and melodic, while the narrative became metaphoric in lyrics.

The Saturday morning cartoon Josie and the Pussycats also had these delightful little chase-scene pop songs and I remember pulling my tape recorder up to the TV to record as many chases as I could. The catchy riffs and chord progressions sounded like what they looked like.  Pink Floyd’s The Wall almost sent me to film school, though music videos were distinctly hit or miss when it came to making synaesthetic sense. Decades later, when I showed the painting Ananya to my husband, he said, quoting (almost) Ed Harris’ film about Jackson Pollock by saying:  “You’ve blown the comic book thing wide open.”   I was a little miffed by that but I’ve resolved to take it the right way.

As for the lyrical themes in my songs, they often deal with foreignness, women, social commentary and spirituality. The world rhythms and sound textures are inspired, among other things, by our Brooklyn block parties where Puerto Ricans, Irish, and various other neighbors got together to sing, dance, and play congas. World Fusion itself, or Global Pop – depending on how ditzy I'm feeling at the time – is also a metaphor for intermingling.

You can read more about what inspires my music and how the CD Rhythms of Another Life came about at Rhythms of Another Life; Story.