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S Y N A E S T H E S I A

Synaesthesia is where a sensory input of one kind causes a `virtual' sensory input of another kind. Like seeing letters in colour, as in the title to this page (which I cribbed from Sean Day's synesthesia site). Except that someone who really has letter-colour synaesthesia would automatically see both the `actual' colours, and their personal associated colours.

Two of my friends are letter-colour synaesthetes, and I wrote the applet below to help the rest of us appreciate a little of their world, though my friends' description of what they actually see is much more complex than my modest computer graphics skills.

There used to be a Java applet here, but browsers don't allow those any more. However, you can download the Synae.jar file and run it as a standalone program. The Synae program is written in literate Java and is free software.

If you type some text in the small panel it will echo in colours in the large panel. (The panels do not wrap around automatically, so you'll need to type carriage returns explicitly.) You can select whose colour scheme to use by using the button at the bottom.