Synaesthesia is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal linkage — for example, hearing a tone (the inducing stimulus) evokes an additional sensation of seeing a colour (concurrent perception). Of the different types of synaesthesia, most have colour as the concurrent perception¹, with concurrent perceptions of smell or taste being rare^{2, 3}. Here we describe the case of a musician who experiences different tastes in response to hearing different musical tone intervals, and who makes use of her synaesthetic sensations in the complex task of tone-interval identification. To our knowledge, this combination of inducing stimulus and concurrent perception has not been described before.

1. Institute of Neuropsychology, University of Zurich, 8032 Zürich, Switzerland

Correspondence to: Lutz Jäncke¹ Email: l.jaencke@psychologie.unizh.ch

MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS

These links to content published by NPG are automatically generated.