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Events | The Taste of Words: Synaesthesia – the Sixth Sense

The Taste of Words: Synaesthesia – the Sixth Sense

  • Location: Soho House New York, Vinyl Room
  • Date: 23.08.17
  • Time: 18:30pm onwards
  • Booking: Please note that this is a members only event for Soho House NYC, so please contact Nick at Arcadia Education for info.

bannerLexical Gustatory Synaesthesia is arguably the most unusual of the myriad strains of synaesthesia (the conjoining of the senses) enabling the individual to ‘taste’ words. Nick Nelson, Director of Arcadia Education UK and freelance Art Historian will explore with visual and aural stimuli, the fascinating familial neurological phenomenon of synaesthesia. The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is reputed to have experienced chromosthesia in which heard sounds automatically and involuntarily evoked an experience of colour, whereas the writer Baudelaire had grapheme-colour synaesthesia, prompting the painter Robert Delaunay to illustrate his poem ‘A Time in Hell’ with coloured vowels and consonants on Baudelaire’s instruction. Nick’s Masters Degree Thesis in History of Art centered upon ‘Harmony and Discord’ in the Relationship between Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg and their shared synaesthetic experiences. The fascinating ‘Sound of Chocolate’ initiative pioneered in Brussels last year explored a shared taste and sound experiment in an attempt to induce a pseudo-synaesthetic sensation. This insight into a rare co-sensory phenomenon has triggered further intrigue into the science of synaesthesia. Come and join our debate and ascertain if you have any inherent synaesthetic tendencies!

For more information about this event please contact: janel.higgs@sohohouse.com