Music-colour synaesthesia: Sensorimotor features and synaesthetic experience

Disciplinary background A. Synaesthesia: Music-colour synaesthesia is included under the umbrella term “coloured hearing” (Ward et al., 2006). Although the phenomenon is typically considered to be separate from general cognition, the shared mental processes of synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes (Simner, 2012) suggest that there may be certain similarities and differences that are a matter of degree. It is argued here that music-colour synaesthesia may share a similar grounding in action to general music cognition (Curwen, 2020). Disciplinary background B. Embodied Cognition: General music cognition research has embraced embodied accounts highlighting the importance of an acting body and its engagement in the context of musical emotion, communication, participation and musical creativity (Schiavio et al., 2017, van der Schyff et al., 2018). In contrast to approaches presenting music cognition as a series of internal (i.e., computational, neural) processes and representations, these approaches propose the direct, circular interaction between the agent’s body and its social, cultural, and physical environment (Reybrouck, 2014). Abstract The main aim and objective of this study is to highlight commonalities between mechanisms underlying music-colour synaesthesia and general music cognition, and to demonstrate some forms of music-colour synaesthesia are grounded in action. Two groups (synaesthetes/non-synaesthetes) reported their experience whilst listening to 3 sets of 4 musical excerpts presented in random order: