Smells and Bells

     Sound and hearing are interesting to me because I feel like I have a love/hate relationship with them. Some sounds, like my favorite music genres and nature sounds, I love and enjoy listening to. Other times, and with other sounds, I really dislike hearing them and/or feel overwhelmed by them. For me, sound is the sense that I most associate with the extremes of feeling incredibly understood/calmed by music and feeling uncomfortable/overwhelmed by sounds that are unpleasant (at least to me). I physically cringe when I think about nails scratching a chalkboard or the sensation of cotton squeaking between my fingers. Yet, I’ve always loved music. I played the cello all throughout school, loved performing in musicals, and still sing along to my favorite songs on car rides by myself. After reading Ackerman’s chapter on hearing, I still wonder: why are some sounds so joyous and others so detestable?      A particularly intense case of certain sounds causing...

      Immediately upon reading this chapter the first thing that shocked me was the common belief that people with synesthesia are "primitive". While I understand this description in an evolutionary sense, I don't agree with labeling it as "primitive". To be able to see color in things that don't have color such as letters and music is something that many dream of, people will even go as far as to take drugs to achieve this (much like those who took LSD and watched fantasia). Of course synesthesia has its downsides, being constantly overloaded with senses must be overwhelming.      Which segues into my next point I wanted to make regarding the authors comments in the postscript. One particular quote that Ackerman wrote that caught my attention was " Ecstasy means being flung out of your usual self, but that  is  still to feel a commotion inside". It made me realize that the same could be said for any drug theoretically, everyone takes drugs in ...

Photo  from Flickr by Jonathan Kim. CC 2.0 General Throughout high school, I was a part of a program for girls in creative writing in LA called WriteGirl. I am still a member of WriteGirl because once you start you never really want to stop. They were, and still are, such a good influence on my life and the lives of hundred other girls with big aspirations to become authors, poets, journalists, and countless other things.  In the spring of 2020, I got matched with a weekly mentor. Rory and I would meet every week for a year straight, and we still try to meet up once in a while to keep writing. When Ackerman started describing the odd little habits writers had before they got any work done, I started to think back on my own habits with Rory. Some writers listen to one song until the piece is done, yes. Rory and I use songs as writing prompts for ten or fifteen-minute writing sessions. Sometimes, we'll use a specific lyric as a jumping-off point for our pieces, or we'd simply us...

I read a book called A Mango-Shaped Space when I was in fifth grade. It’s about a young girl who discovers that she has synesthesia. She figures this out when she realizes that not everyone is able to associate numbers, letters, words, sounds, etc. with colors. I actually knew what synesthesia was prior to reading this book because my mom has it. My sisters and I loved having her describe the color of each of our names- mine was a dark shade of green to her. My mom is also extremely talented at playing piano and has the musical gift of having perfect pitch. I think this is because she is able to see colors when hearing sounds, which helps her identify notes and keys. I always wish I had synesthesia, particularly the type known as Lexical-Gustatory, in which a person experiences taste and smell from written and spoken words, as well as when they see certain colors and feel certain emotions. I think the fact that the individual is experiencing the world in an entirely different wa...