From as far as I can remember, I have seen colors when I hear sounds, feel temperature, and slightly when I taste things (I'm still having a debate with myself over if I get colors from smells).
One day, my family and I were playing a word association game, and the word someone told me was "teacher". Me, being the honest boy I was said straight out: "The color peach". People just thought I didn't understand the game.
Another time, I was being tought about the blue and red markings on water taps (to tell which is which). I wanted to asked: "Why are they red and blue? hot is supposed to be pink and cold is supposed to be yellow".
I was so glad in 2002 when I finally found out what this was called, and found out that there were others like me.
I am glad in some way that I do have synaesthesia for the reason, even though I am now totally blind, I'll never forget colors because I still see them so frequently.
And definitly my favorite pass-time is to put some headphones on with my favorite music and just relax in the brillient sound / visual display I get.
This meens that the Nokia mobile phone tunes are green in fassion and the Erichson mobile phone tunes are red in fassion.
I'm yet to find an actual pattern between sound and color for me, if anyone can see one, I'd love to know about it. The obvious one so far is that pitch from low to high makes a spectrum of color, but depending on the tambre and harmonics of the sound, it can completely bias the spectrum in different ways.
I have been learning about the natural harmonic series and I'm thinking that perhaps it has something to do with whether the harmonics are even or odd multiples etc.
rest of teens follow single digits
rest of 10s follow single digits
My synaesthesia doesn't just produce colors, in some cercomstances it also gives shape to those colors. An example of this is time of day.
When I imagine a certain time of day, I see all the hours represented by their associated number colors, placed in a huge ring around my head. How ever, this ring isn't completely horizontal. The ring is tipped so that 12PM is slightly higher than 12 AM.
When I think of an exact time, (in my inner mind) i turn to face that time in the ring. So if I think of 12PM, I see 12pm right in front of me, but slightly higher than my nose, and I see 1PM to the left, and 11AM to the right. Yes, thats right, my time ring actually runs anti-clockwise. If I am thinking of say... 4PM, I see 4PM in front of me, at about mid height, with 3PM to the right and a touch higher, and 5 to the left and a bit lower.
So, if I do a full 360 degree turn around this clock (to the left) starting at 12PM I see: 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, (I am now facing my back to where I started --- 12PM), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
As I said, the hours are their number-color equivalents, except for the fact that the hours from 7PM to 9AM are slightly darker than normal.
Days of the week, and months also show themselves as a slightly tipped-up ring around my head.
Lists like letters and numbers (which don't rap back around) just keep going up and to the left.
In fact, all ordered lists that you can think of, all show themselves to me as going from right to left. The only exception to this rule is the spelling of words, and musical skales. These both go from left to right.
I would say that spelling of words goes from left to right because that is how English is written. As for musical skales, well, the piano goes from left to right. But any list that doesn't have a physical direction, goes from right to left.
Even temperature (where cold is yellow, mid is nothing, hot is pink) shows its self as a fading skale from right (cold) to left (hot).
(In fact, all color names I see the actual colors, synesthesia is over-ridden here).
I must also add that, the louder the sound, the brighter the color. Also when I listen to music in stereo, the colors are placed in their correct stereoscopic places.
Height also has a role to play in my synaesthesia (especially in complex music) but I'm yet to successfully link that back to an audio attribute.
Even the bands on an EQ have colors, or at least are color biases to the music anyway.
One of my pet hates is an EQ not properly set... perhaps this is because I also have a color perception of it.
I've noticed if sound or music is played at a faster and higher frequency than it should be (like a tape playing too fast) all the colors have a red/orange bias to them. and its the same if its too slow/low, all the colors have a blue bias to them.
This is sort of ironic because the dopler effect for light is completely opposite to this.