You know, I'd never actually looked at the wikipedia article before-- it's incredibly comprehensive. My main source of info about synaesthesia came when a philosophy professor of mine recommended the book
The Man Who Tasted Shapes. He had been making some point about the reliability of the senses and asked the room if anyone associated vowels with colors-- and, dead shocked, I raised my hand. I was the only one who did, and I felt very strange, but it was awesome to finally know what on earth was up with my crazy brain. A friend of mine growing up also had music-color synaesthesia, and we got into quite a few of those 'arguments' you refer to: "This song is yellow and white!" "Nonono, it's
shiny like that, but it's definitely light blue, like the sky." Of course, I didn't know it was synaesthesia at the time.
My synaesthesia is largely audio/visual, and a bit tactile-- my sense of smell is pretty lacking by nature, and taste is likewise not a very powerful way I experience the world. I've thought about doing exercises to improve my other senses... a friend of mine has been spending a few hours blindfolded each day and has made quite a few gains on that front. It'd be interesting to see if this influences my synaesthesia, but it's probably hard-wired and I will just have to guess at the true taste of red. Sad..
So do you have a firm association of taste for each thing, or do the tastes blend into each other sometimes? Reading what you said about music makes it sound like a banquet. (Likewise with the touch of songs-- are there many different kinds? Do you experience them all as you listen to a song?) We should compare notes on a song sometime.
Music is probably where my synaesthesia manifests most strongly. Listening to music is an intensely imaginative and visual experience for me-- honestly, probably JUST as visual as audial. For example, let's take the song "Joga" by Bjork. It's one of my favorite songs because it evokes incredibly deep greens, in a range from darkest green-black to a more foresty teal. When I listen to the song, the greens feel as though they are streaked across my mind with an extremely thick paint, Van Gogh-thick, that's shot through with black and white. Later the feeling is punctuated (when the heavy beats come in) with round pulses of silver that kind of... ripple through the image. And (here's where I get weird) the whole thing has a kind of explosive warmth, like it's about a forest that's growing on an active volcano, with rivers of lava in subterranean caverns deep beneath the roots; so I have this sense that beneath all the green there is deep soil and earth, and something slow-moving, glowing, and hot. (Those last bits are definitely associations I'm making with the song's content, and, interestingly enough, the music video also has lava in it! I listened to the song before I saw it, so that's pretty awesome.)
As you can see it is really that my brain has a built in audio visualizer. ^^
I also have grapheme-color synaesthesia, so letters have intense color associations. I actually don't associate consonants with colors, for whatever reason -- well, I do, but the colors are very faint and not very 'influential,' if that any makes sense at all.. so I have no reason to object to the idea that s is dark yellow.
But vowels are incredibly distinct: a is red; e is blue; o is white; u is yellow or orange; and i is a "wild card" vowel with multiple potentialities, usually green or violet, like your Q. This leads to a fascination with "y" when it is a vowel, actually-- its color is even more mercurial because it isn't a typical vowel, and because it takes the sound of the unpredictable "i". I know it sounds strange, but the letter "y" is special to me; I suppose the significance similar to what people mean when they say they have a lucky number.
Words are comprised of many different colours which kind of "blend" together, with the most "prominent" colour or sound dominating the rest of the word. I know that sounds extremely strange and probably really complicated.
Makes sense to me! Most words have colors for me too. Typically, the first vowel in a word will influence its color the most, but it depends. What determines the predominant color of the word for you?
Since you have grapheme-color synaesthesia, I'm curious if the names of people and concepts have colors distinct from their letters. For me, they do, and they supersede or blend in with the vowel colors. For instance, I have a friend named Danika. Danika on her own is a kind of light, intense, planty green to me, like a calyx. She's calm, creative, and quiet. However, she has a feistiness to her personality as well, and that combined with the first 'a' in her name gives her a kind of pinkish-red tinge. (This sort of thing makes naming characters really, really, REALLY difficult, by the way.)
Numbers totally have personalities! Evens tend to be balanced, sturdier types for me; odds are edgier, more prone to extremes. So 6 is definitely not a sarcastic, clever guy! ^^ He's a very normal-seeming middle aged fellow with a briefcase, but who is wiser than one would think, a lot like Richard from Neverwhere. He is also very orange. (I think I may associate round shapes in general with orange; not sure.) 7, on the other hand, is wild and defiant and potently magical, maybe because 7 reminds me of the letter y's shape.
(In light of all this, my name has a fairly interesting story. Despite the similarities to the word synaesthesia, I made it up on my own when I was eleven, way before I was familiar with the concept... though I like to think that maybe I'd seen the word synaestheisia before and had a synaesthetic attraction to it, since it's an incredibly gorgeous word to me. Syn- words, like syncretic, synthesis, and synchronicity, are generally some of my favorites. There are a number of cases where my synaesthesia has done weirdly prophetic things like that, and often, the more colorful and vibrant a word is, the more I will love its meaning. There's so much going on with perception that we just aren't consciously aware of, and synaesthesia is proof!)
Ahh, I specialize in tl;dr. Long Syna post is long. But I only know a couple synaesthetes in real life, so it's always fun to compare notes when I can!