Moore, S., 2010.

An Eyeful of Sound: a case study

This paper is a presentation of the Wellcome Trust funded collaborative project An Eyeful of Sound. The project was a collaborative one between synaesthetic people, researchers and film makers concerned with visually describing synaesthesia to a wider audience. The culmination of the project was a 10 minute animated documentary about what it is like to have audio-visual synaesthesia, directed by Samantha Moore in conjunction with neuro-psychologist Dr Jamie Ward, Tessa Verrecchia, Emma Suddaby and Julie Roxburgh.

The presentation will look at the challenges of working on representing a unique brain state like synaesthesia through animation and the ways in which the information collected was collated and verified. It also discusses more generally the role of animation in representing synaesthesia or other unique brain states and the strengths and shortcomings of such representations, such as in the work of Tim Webb, Paul Vester and the author's own work. It questions whether animation is the primary vehicle for representing such subjective states, not just in a representative, symbolic way but in a literal recording of reality - albeit a reality unique to the subject.