If you’ve never heard of synesthesia, you might be a little perplexed about the concept. But for people with the condition, it’s totally normal! You see, those with synesthesia experience one sense (hearing, for example) simultaneously with an additional sense (such as sight). Think of it as “joint perception.” For some musicians, their experience with synesthesia consists of seeing colors in music. Yep, that’s right. They literally see images through sound. Pretty crazy, right?!
Billie Eilish has the condition and explained it during The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon as “a thing in your brain where you associate random stuff to everything. So for instance, every day of the week has a color, a number, a shape. Sometimes things have a smell that I can think of or a temperature or a texture.”
Even though Billie surmounts it all to “mean nothing,” she did admit that it “inspires a bunch of stuff.” Which Billie went on to list, “like all my videos for the most part have to do with synesthesia, all of my artwork, everything I do live, all the colors for each song, it’s because those are the colors for those songs specifically.”
Jimmy even got his own synesthetic reading, and according to the “bad guy” singer he’s a “vertical brown rectangle.” LOL!
Stars like Billie, Alessia Cara, Lorde and more have all opened up about having synesthesia and how it actually can help them with their creative process. They all might “hear colors” in different ways, so it’s quite interesting to uncover each and every celebrity’s own experience with visualizing colors, textures or patterns through music. It’s all super complex, TBH.
Scroll through the gallery to discover all your favorite celebrities who experience synesthesia and how it affects their process of creating music!
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