For him, music is not only sound. It arrives as texture, movement and color.
London
British artist Jake Andrew experiences music through synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense automatically triggers another sensory response. In his case, sounds generate immediate visual impressions that can include colors, shapes, textures and movement. His paintings attempt to capture those perceptions as they happen.
Andrew’s preferred instrument to paint is the cello. He describes its sound as dark without being threatening, accompanied by visual forms and particulate textures that seem to emerge from the instrument itself. Other everyday sounds also produce distinct responses. A passing motorcycle may appear dark purple, while the bark of a friend’s dog can register as lime green.
That relationship between hearing and vision became the basis of a live performance at the Handbag Factory in Vauxhall, London. Pianists Camden Stewart and Karim Kamar improvised around original compositions while Andrew painted the music in real time. The result transformed a concert into an encounter between sound and visual art, allowing an audience to observe how one sensory experience could be translated into another.
His perceptions do not necessarily follow conventional emotional associations. A minor key does not automatically produce a dark or melancholic image. E minor, for example, can appear to Andrew as deep blue combined with slow swirling movement and legato forms. The experience is therefore highly individual rather than a fixed system in which every sound corresponds universally to the same color.
Neuroscientists describe this sound color form of synesthesia as chromesthesia. Cognitive neuroscience research suggests that the experience can involve not only color but also spatial arrangement, texture and movement. That helps explain why Andrew’s paintings function less like illustrations of songs and more like records of a complex internal sensory response.
Synesthesia can occasionally interrupt his thoughts because sound triggers visual information automatically. Andrew nevertheless does not regard the condition as a burden. He considers it inseparable from the way he experiences the world and says he cannot imagine what perception would feel like without it.
His work therefore occupies a space between neuroscience and art. It makes visible something that normally exists only inside one person’s perception.
The music remains the same for everyone in the room. What changes is the world it creates inside the listener.
Every silence speaks.