NewScientist (24 March 2018, paywall) reports on another way we can cross our circuits:
ELLIOT FREEMAN was a student when he first noticed that he could hear Morse code. Looking out into the dark one evening, he spotted a lighthouse flashing a signal. “Every time I saw the flash I heard a distinct buzzing sound,” he says. “I thought ‘That’s kind of odd. I should look into that sometime.’”
It turns out Freeman isn’t alone. He is one of a group of people who experience a phenomenon called visually evoked auditory response. This form of synaesthesia makes people hear noises when they see certain silent moving images. Now he has carried out the biggest study of the condition so far and found that one-fifth of us seem to experience it.
With his colleague Christopher Fassnidge, Freeman, a psychologist at City, University of London, built an online survey that tests for this response. They found that about 22 per cent of the 4000 respondents rated more than half the videos in the test as stimulating clear sounds.
22% showed visual-to-audio synaesthesia? Wow!
This does remind me of some experiments done a few years ago in which computer code was translated into sound, and then programmers would attempt to detect problems with the code by listening to the sound generated from the code in question. There was some evidence that this actually worked, but I’ve not heard anything since the initial report.
Here’s my guess how Windows 10 might sound:
Just kidding!
