It occurred to me, if I’m gonna order the letters by visual spectrum why not order their grayscale equivalents by value? And, lo, it was done:
This new ordering is now:
OUXYSVWAQHDGMBEPFKNZTJCIRL
8029635417
Tag Archives: synaesthesia
Rejiggered Synaesthetic Spectrum
For some reason I was thinking of the synaesthetic spectrum I prepared for this blog a couple years back, and it occurred to me that while it was a spectrum of the colors as far as alphabetic order is concerned, it wasn’t really a spectrum as far as wavelength is concerned. Of course, that means we have to re-order the letters so they correspond to the visual spectrum. And, if you do the letters, you have to do the numbers, too:
Of course, there are two problems: one, some of the colors don’t have pure spectral equivalents, and two, some of the colors are not colors, but shades. For the first one, I basically just assigned the letter a position that looked good, except for the brown letters, which ended up on the red end of the spectrum, something of a alphanumeric infra-red, if you will. The shaded letters were more problematic, so I just grouped them in a grayscale continuum of their own.
So, in this particular reordered alphabet, the new arrangement can be written as OUXVIRLJWQFTEGHASYDPMBNKZC, and 8074362951.
Alphanumeric Synaesthetic Interpretation of Digital Self-Portrait Pixel Values
This is an old project that suddenly found new life. It also needs a bit of explanation. Let’s say you have a black and white digital image, all shades of gray. Each of these pixels has a value that ranges from 0 (black) to 255 (white). This range looks odd, until you realize it’s actually a number coded in hexadecimal. This means that instead of 0123456789, the numbers count like 01234567890ABCDEF, which means each digit has 16 values. In normal numbers, “10″ is exactly ten, and in hexadecimal, “10″ is actually sixteen. This also means that “100″ in decimal is exactly one hundred (10×10), and in hexadecimal, “100″ is 256 (16×16).
What this means is that gray pixels can be defined as a two-digit number from 00 to FF. This means I can convert a two-digit grayscale pixel number to two color values representing my alphanumeric synaesthesia for those digits. If a pixel is gray value 78, a dark gray, the hexadecimal number is 4E, which is colored 4E.
So a grayscale image will convert to a full-color image with doubled pixels. Here’s an example of those pixels:
So I decided to create a self-portrait using this coloring scheme. I used this base image in grayscale:
I has to do some serious data conversion and manipulation, but I finally got that image rendered in the colors I see related to letters and numbers:
And here is that color map, layered with the original image:
Synaesthetic Spectra
Another Synaesthetic Note
This is on my website as well, but I figured it would be nice to link it here, as well. It’s a time readout made of squares, each of which displays a color corresponding to the color I associate with each number. The top row is the time (HHMM) and the bottom row is the date (MMDD). So, at the time of this writing, 11:05, Sept 22, the clock would read 1105 (brown-brown-grey-red) over 0922 (grey-orange-yellow-yellow). It will look different for you, of course, because you’re reading this at a later date. It will also change as the time progresses. I did a version with seconds, but that got a little too distracting. Hope you enjoy this version.
So What Does “Mindhue” Mean?
“Mindhue” is a reference to my alphanumeric synaesthesia, where
different numbers and letters associate with different colors. For
example, to me, the “m” in “mindhue” is a orangy red, while the “n”
is a much darker red. “D”, on the other hand, is pure orange. “I” is
black, whereas “u” is white. “H” and “e” are both green, but the “h”
is lighter and duller and the “e” is more foresty.