Welcome to Synaesthetic
Welcome to the new blog Synaesthetic, dedicated to exploring the ways we connect to recorded music through visuals.
The name of this blog references the idea of synesthesia, the perceptual phenomenon in which people experience certain senses as linked. (Think colored sounds, or words that have distinct tastes.) Though synesthesia is commonly thought of as a rare and exceptional trait, recent work by anthropologists and psychologists has uncovered that a lot of human sensory experience is synesthetic—that is, the boundaries between sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste are not as clear as we once thought. As Psychologist Richard Cytowic puts it in his TEDed video above, in the brain, “cross-talk” between the senses “is the rule, not the exception.”
So what does this mean for us as music listeners?
Thomas Edison and his phonograph, 1878
150 years ago, audiences would have taken for granted that musical sounds had distinct, visible sources—a singer, a piano, a guitar. Before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, there was no way to capture and reproduce sound. If you heard a song, you could count on the fact that a nearby human was performing it.
Cover of Smash Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart (Columbia C-11, 1940), the first record to have dedicated cover artwork. Designed by Columbia Records art director Alex Steinweiss.
During the 20th century, the music recording industry began to shape the ways we received our music. The musical sounds they captured and distributed on records were separated from their original visible sources. By the 1940s, the new marketing concept of album art began to fill the visual sensory void, (re)connecting the recorded sounds to imagery through their packaging.
Long-playing discs (LPs), an industry standard from the 1950s into the 1980s, marked a high point for album art. Their 12-inch square cases provided a lot of room that could be filled with imagery and text. As the industry transitioned to smaller physical formats like the cassette tape and CD, the real estate available to album cover designers diminished considerably. By the 2000s, consumers began to bypass physical formats altogether, instead acquiring music tracks through Internet downloads of .mp3 files. Non-physical formats shifted the emphasis to individual tracks over whole albums, seeming to hail the downfall of the album and its attending artwork altogether.
Photo by Miguel Ferreira. Featured record: ZONE 4 by D’Marc Cantu
In the age of digital streaming, it's not clear what role album art will play in the future. There is revived interest in collecting LPs, with their big beautiful covers, but many of us prefer the convenience of streaming services accessible on small devices. On these platforms, we are interacting more consistently with album visuals, albeit in thumbnail form. Still, streaming services offer expanded possibilities for music visuals. Spotify, for example, recently added new visual elements, including Canvas video loops that stream in the visual background of the app. Whether this type of visual will become essential to the experience of music streaming remains to be seen.
At Synaesthetic, we will be posting on the the history, aesthetics, and culture of the visuals that surround recorded music, and we hope you’ll join us as we explore the audio-visual experience of music.
Follow us on Instagram for updates and new blog posts weekly @syne_online.
What album artwork has impacted your listening?
How have visuals changed the way you engage with music?
What albums should we cover in this blog?
Let us know in the comments.
