Crossmodal correspondences and the aesthetic imagination: Looking for links between sound symbolism and synaesthesia

“Are lemons fast or slow?”; “Is carbonated water round or angular?”; Most people agree on their answers to these questions. These are examples of correspondences, that is, the tendency for a feature in one sensory modality, either physically present or merely imagined, to be matched (or associated) with a feature, either physically present or merely imagined, in another modality. Crossmodal correspondences appear to exist between all pairings of senses, and have been shown to affect everything from people’s speeded responses to their performance in unspeeded psychophysical tasks.

In this talk, Dr. Spence will discuss a number of the explanations that have been put forward to account for the existence of crossmodal correspondences. He will also examine the relationship between crossmodal correspondences and sound symbolism, and tackle the thorny question of whether crossmodal correspondences should be thought of as a kind of synaesthesia that is common to us all. Finally, Dr. Spence will invite the audience to ponder the implications of this experimental research for our understanding of synaesthesia in the arts (e.g. Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences,” or the paintings of Francis Bacon, Wassily Kandinsky, or possibly even those of Arthur Dove).