wow! I have heard of this concept my whole life, but never knew there was a term for it. But in terms of my own experience, I have never explicitly experienced Synesthasia. Frankly, the closest comparison I think I could meet is my own affinity for music and how that connects with advertising, and more generally my own mental perceptions.
coming from a musical background, I used to evaluate music in terms of classical criticism (i.e. movement, key, phrasing, melody, etc.) but after studying advertising and exposing myself to higher frequencies of TV advertising on daily basis (sometimes >100 ads/day), I now find that before I can think about music as music, I think of it as images and experiences.
Succinctly, when I hear a new piece of music I no longer evaluate it based on my interest or enjoyment. Instead, I think about how the music makes me feel and what emotion it best captures and how that emotion can be applied to a various ad scenarios.
For instance, I've had Sleigh Bell's "Crown to the Ground" stuck in my head for over a year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z8ppcFGPlY. But the reasons for this fixation are not the music per se; its more the images the piece conjures up in my head. To me, I could see this song being used effectively in a product preview or a teaser, particularly for an urban lifestyle brand. the example I used as an undergrad with this song was for Puma shoes and how it relates to unifying the Hispanic market in urban-Chicago.
Put to music, I see a vignette of gritty urban life with many quick cuts and novel camera orientations; graffiti, little girls jump-roping, bustling streets, crowded Mercados, Spanish signs, and street vendors. In terms of themes, I felt that the song was a unifying mechanism for young Hispanics; it was a call to action, an alarm going off before the beat drops at 0:22. And when that beat drops, all hell literally breaks loose; the streets are packed with young Hispanics in their neighborhoods and they're environment and they are all declaring their unity and presence in the city!
Even now I am getting far to excited over this! lol
Best,
Rick
their*
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