“A Light in Sound, a Sound-Like Power in Light”: Poetry, Synaesthesia & Multimedia

Abstract

Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon of cross-modal perception in which stimulation of one sensory pathway results in automatic, simultaneous, involuntary experiences in a second sensory pathway, such as the perceiving of sound as a colour. Creatively employed as a literary trope, synaesthesia involves the blending of different sense modalities, often in the form of figurative language. Exploring the interrelationship of synaesthetic aesthetics and experimentation from a historical perspective, this essay traces the transgressive artistic impulse to blur sensorial boundaries through technical innovation from the eighteenth-century audio-visual experiments of Louis Bertrand Castel’s ocular harpsichord (clavecin pour les yeux) to twenty-first century LED colour organs, speech coding, and Augmented/Virtual Reality interfaces used in multisensory art exhibitions. By outlining a few of the major historical developments of synaesthetic theory and poetics as well as some of the diverse immersive experiences made possible through original combinations of discrete sensory channels via transmedial artistic experimentation, the present paper aims to demonstrate how synaesthesia – located at the interface of literature and neuroscience, sensation and ideation, mind and body – might also fruitfully be explored in relation to lyric poetry at the interface of multisensoriality and multimedia.