story © Michael Betancourt | published January 9, 2009 | permalink |  |  

There is an analogous relationship between technological translations of data from one type to another with synaesthetic responses: the transcoding of electromagnetic telemetry by Dr. Donald Gurnett is one a striking and direct examples of this type of sonification of non-sound data; however, it is also, in many ways, a non-significant transfer: the data in question are readings of wave-form encounters. The electromagnetic information produced from the Cassini mission, among others, has a long-recognized analogous relationship to sound, so the transfer from light waves to sound waves should come as no surprise—each is a physical phenomenon whose transfer is less dramatic than the cross-modal sensory transfers familiar from synaesthesia.

A more intriguing potential for transcoding lies within digital technology, and there may be a more fruitful comparison to be made with this model: whatever the initial input into the digital system, once it has been processed (digitized) all inputs become equivalent. While the human sensory apparatus is not a digital or digitizing system, all sensory inputs are translated into the same medium—nerve impulses—and are interpreted into the dynamic reality we experience by different “modules” of the brain. Synaesthesia appears within this organic model as the interpretation of one senses’ inputs by a different “module” than typically interprets those inputs. The occasional mis-attribution of digital files and their consequent mis-interpretation through the “wrong” software is thus a logical analogy for synaesthesia within a technical matrix, a technesthesia.

To assume a literal overlap between the human synaesthetic experience and the technesthetic is to make a fundamental category mistake. The apparent results of such “errors” do not necessarily resemble the human sensory experience; however, they do reveal something similar—underlying and inaccessible structures of the interpretative apparatus itself. With the human mind, what appears are aspects of the synaesthetic individuals’ idiosyncratic interpretative apparatus and how that normally inaccessible apparatus functions, with a machine, what is revealed are some of the assumptions ingrained in the design and programming of the software itself.

It might be tempting to identify the technical synaesthetic effect as a “glitch” would be an error. The mechanical misinterpretation in question is not a result of an error in the coding, but rather a result of misattribution—a confusion of type rather than a mistake in execution. The digital file in question is intact, it is merely being decoded following an incorrect interpretative paradigm, akin to the errors that appear as a result of incompatibilities between different versions of the same program.

Sound-to-Image visualizers, or image-to-sound translators do not qualify as examples of technesthesia. The audible translation of an image following a predetermined (or user-mappable) set of parameters is nothing more than the attempt to recreate synaesthesia following a set paradigm; the autonomous translation of a QuickTime movie into a sound file is, in contrast, an example of technesthesia. It is autonomous, uncontrollable and follows the underlying structure of an otherwise normally-functioning software. It is a special case of misattribution within a normally functioning system, not the normal function of a program designed to produce some specific transcoding. This abnormality of function in an otherwise normally functioning system is the key to this analogical relationship to synaesthesia—synaesthetes (typically) are not crippled by their conditions, nor are these experiences the results of some special intervention against otherwise normal function. A technical analogue to the organic experience must meet the same base-line criteria of exceptional experience within otherwise normal function.

The custom creation of “patches” or codecs to enable these transfers so long as they do not destabilized normal functions, however, would meet the base-line criteria for a technesthetic “player” or software program.