What Synesthesia Taught Me About Design: My Talk at Spectrum Tokyo #25

On September 2nd 2026 I gave a five minute lightning talk at Spectrum Tokyo Meetup #25. The title was “What Synesthesia Taught Me About Design”. Here is the talk, written out, with a few thoughts on the evening.

Where the word comes from

Synesthesia has followed me for more than twenty years, since I first played Rez on my Sega Dreamcast. Tetsuya Mizuguchi built that game entirely around the idea. To keep it simple, it’s hearing color and seeing sound. I remember reading at the time that he was inspired by the paintings of Kandinsky.

I found that idea endlessly inspiring, and I’ve worked with it, on and off, in personal projects ever since. This year I finally got to live one of my dream projects, built entirely around it.

Alt Real, twelve tracks, twelve worlds

That project is “Alt Real”, the album of the French indie band N U I T. In a three week creative burst I made twelve videos, one for each track, and we released them one by one over twelve weeks.

There was no template. Every track got its own visual world, driven entirely by its stems, the separated audio layers. The drums control the intensity of the sunlight. The vocal volume controls the spacing between each letter of the lyrics. It all comes down to audio-reactivity, and the shared design process was inspired by synesthesia.

“But are you a synesthete?”

Partway through the series, a member of the band asked me directly: “But are you a synesthete?”

I couldn’t answer. Sometimes I see a color, an effect or a movement when I hear sound. I don’t know if that’s a real trait, twenty years of habit from doing this kind of audiovisual work, or memory dressed up as perception.

What the behind-the-scenes videos showed me

To promote the project, we release a behind-the-scenes video every week. Describing what I made, how, and why turned out to be unsettling.

After nine weeks, while researching one of the videos, I found an image of a Vanitas painting and it shocked me. What I thought were art-directed choices specific to this project were symbols I had studied twenty years ago.

Another example is an audio-reactive skeleton I built for the series. When I described it as a “dancing skeleton” for the BTS, I suddenly got flashes of a video game I played thirty years ago, Monkey Island 2. I found the scene on YouTube and was stunned by how close my color choices were to it.

Instinct is a design tool

That’s where I drew the parallel with synesthesia. Beyond sound and color, I think I’ve absorbed thirty-nine years of cultural references. They are now part of my visual language, and they come back instinctively, almost unconsciously, whenever I need to create something and echo it in a project.

Trust your own chain

Instead of asking why my brain reacts the way it does, I’ve learned to enjoy watching the dominoes fall. Rez, then Kandinsky, got me here, building visualizers in Tokyo. I’ve stopped trying to trace it any further back than that.

What I’d leave you with is this: trust your own chain. Whatever your own version of Rez is, a game, a painting, a memory, it’s probably already doing more design work for you than you give it credit for.

About the evening

I was a bit nervous, but meeting the Spectrum Tokyo team was great. They know how to put speakers at ease and they create a really good atmosphere. I’m very happy to have met the other speakers, and to have talked with so many people in the room about synesthesia. Thank you to everyone who came and shared their own experiences afterwards.

Photos © Spectrum Tokyo