c h a p t e r 1 5 ALGORITHMIC SYNESTHESIA

noam sagiv, roger t. dean, and freya bailes WE often think about our senses as separate and independent of each other. However, there are at least four problems with this naı̈ve view. First, our experience of the world around us is a rich multisensory one. Under normal conditions, our senses are constantly flooded with information. Even when we are sitting quietly at home and reading this book, we not only see the text, but also hear the pages flipping, experience the smell of the book, and feel the smooth texture of the pages. Likewise, while drinking from a cup of tea, we would notice its smell and color in addition to the liquid’s taste, temperature, and texture or viscosity. Although we can try to focus our attention on some things and ignore others, it would be safe to say that our sensory experience is rarely limited to one modality even if we try very hard.1 Second, our sensations do seem to come together somehow into a unified experience. The sights and sounds of most events we witness do not appear to be two independent streams of information; in fact, they seem inseparable. A third problem is that the senses do not merely converge somewhere; they also influence each other. As discussed here, visual inputs can influence auditory perception and vice versa. The fourth reason to doubt the independence of the senses is that, for some individuals, stimulation in one sensory modality may actually give rise to percep-tual experience in more than one modality. This remarkable form of perception is labeled synesthesia, and we distinguish here, before drawing some parallels between the two, between the involuntary psychological phenomenon and synesthesia in art involving intentional intermedia experimentation