Chromesthesia: The 7th sense

How would you describe what something smells like to someone who has never had a sense of smell?

A strange kind of challenge, a brain teaser almost. Describing a basic perceptual sensation to someone, who never could understand the feeling, that’s what Chromesthesia is like. For those who have never heard of the condition or spoke to a Chromesthete, it can sound crazy, but in reality, for Louie Burns, the experience can be as natural as hearing or seeing.

Louie Burns, my chromesthetic, co-collaborator, is a 25-year-old, singer/ songwriter, who experiences Chromesthesia. The discovery of the condition came while studying in college at 17, the “Circle of 5^th” which is a visualisation of all major keys and minor keys, and helps you to understand the relationship between keys and chords. Louie happened to mention to her tutor at the time, that the colours representing the keys were wrong, which then lead to the conversation about Chromesthesia.

NEEL (2017) How to use the Circle of Fifths to write songs

Becoming aware of the condition didn’t alter her perception, it simply gave a name to something that had always been part of her. For Louie, there was no “before and after”, no moment of sudden awakening. Her chromesthesia has always shaped the way she hears, sees, and thinks. It’s not something added on top of her senses, but rather something woven through them, becoming a 7^th sense.

Louie’s responses reveal something important: Chromesthesia isn’t an overlay or an add-on to the senses it is a sensory reality. It’s not something she accesses only in moments of creativity; it’s how she always experiences the world, whether she’s paying attention to it.

This raises the question of how we define our sense as normal, for Louie, sound and colour have never been separated, the perception of one is automatically tethered to the experience of the other.

Creating Through the Seventh Sense

When Louie creates or listens to music, the experience takes on two very different forms. Not only is she involuntarily visualising her own songs, through colours, shapes and movement, she becomes fully immersed in them, the songs become an extension of herself. In those moments, Louie doesn’t simply listen, she becomes the music. This sensory fusion transforms the creative process, turning it into a multisensory act of making and feeling.

The sounds and visuals blend seamlessly, like a current flowing through her. She described it as a “visual tapestry”, a continuous weaving of colour, shape, and motion that reacts to the music. This tapestry doesn’t just appear during her music-making process. It’s present even in the subtle moments of everyday life, In situations most of us wouldn’t think twice about, like being in a busy café or walking through town, Louie’s experience is completely different. When she hears people talking, she sees soft, circular shapes in warm hues gently pulsing with the rhythm of conversation.

Sound becomes space. Voices become visuals. Music becomes something you see.

Seeing Sound Together: Co-Creating Through Louie’s Lens

Working alongside Louie means entering her world, one where sound is never just sound. Despite the richness of her perception, Louie often finds it difficult to put into words, “It hurts my brain to describe,” she’s admitted.

Yet, despite that, Louie is generous in trying to communicate it. Through conversation, she opens a window into a world most of us will never directly experience, but can glimpse through her words, and her sound-colour visions.

And how could it not be difficult? That’s the paradox of perceptual difference: the more deeply embodied an experience is, the harder it can be to translate, language tends to separate things into categories, sound, sight, feeling etc, but her unique experience blends those boundaries.

It’s not surprising that explaining something that natural is difficult, language just doesn’t do it justice. It also highlights just how limited language can be when we try to describe a world that’s more felt than translated.

Louie’s chromesthesia adds a whole visual layer to our creative process that’s hard to explain unless you’ve seen it through her eyes. When we co-collaborate, I don’t just ask what something sounds like, try to ask what it looks like to her, and try to interpret the visualisation as best I can.

Her visuals aren’t random, they follow patterns. Certain shapes or colours show up again and again, especially when it comes to specific keys or sounds. She’s even able to hazard a guess at what key a song is in just by the colour it triggers. For her, a song in “A minor” appears as the colour blue.

Seeing Before Hearing

A powerful sentence Louie shared with me during our conversation was, “I know what I want the song to look like before what I want it to sound like”.

That single sentence captures just how deep her relationship with music is.

As her Chromesthesia is associative rather than projective, her experience stems from not only an aesthetic visual but also a positive atmosphere alongside her song-writing and playing guitar, meaning her visuals are deeply personal and tied to her own internal connections. The vibration of the strings seems to sync with the rhythm of the visuals, making the entire experience more immersive. It’s not just writing a song; it’s stepping inside it.

It can be challenging for me to grasp exactly what she’s seeing. There’s no fixed system or colour chart to follow, but through ongoing conversations, I’ve started to understand the language of her perception. From this growing understanding, I can begin to translate those inner visuals into something we can project outward.

Together, we’re not just making music or visuals, we’re building an experience that invites others to step inside Louie’s seventh sense