Music and Visuals: Linda Perhacs and Synesthesia
A fellow student of mine sent me a short documentary about Linda Perhacs during a discussion about my sound / visual project ideas. The relationship between sound and visual arts is something I’ve wanted to take a deeper look into since researching the work of Kandinsky. Linda Perhacs, released one experimental folk album (“Parallelograms”) in 1970, a body of work that derived solely from her musical mind and her experience with the phenomena Synesthesia.
She describes how, during a drive down the freeway, she experienced something unlike anything she had seen before. She describes it as a moving sculpture with intricacies, wavelengths and frequencies in an array of different colours. She claims that at the time she knew she was seeing music. Afterwards, she went on to create a musical body of work that derived from her experiences with visual music. She claims that she has yet come across anything similar to what she had seen other than in the Moca Museum’s “Visual Music since 1900” study. She relates this phenomenon with higher dimensional energies and spiritualism that is beyond the human capacity of thinking,