Acceso usuarios
José Luis Caivano
The subject of synaesthesia is of a very high semiotic concern. It is generally defined as a phenomenon by which stimuli of different sensory modes are associated by means of some kind of perceptual similarity. For this reason, this kind of association generally falls within the domain of iconicity. Accounts of this phenomenon can be traced back to Aristotle, who analyzes the analogies between color and flavor, and smell and taste. This paper deals specifically with the sensorial associations between color and sound, that is, the kind of synaesthesias that make a certain link between visual and auditory signs. Among the semioticians, we found mentions of this specific aspect of synaesthesia in Peirce, Jakobson, Veltrusky, Parret, and Zilberberg, just to mention a few. This article offers an overview on the subject, and presents the results of a survey that shows the psychological correlations between the dimensions of sound (pitch, loudness, timbre, duration) and those of color (hue, lightness, saturation, area).
