There’s something deeply magical about translating one sense into another — hearing sound and expressing it as shape, line, or colour. It’s as if you’re painting what your ears feel. This creative crossover, often called synesthetic art, connects our senses in unexpected ways and helps us tap into a more intuitive, emotional side of creativity.
Listening with your whole self
Before you pick up a brush, choose a piece of music or a soundscape. It could be your favourite song, rainfall, birdsong, or even the hum of a busy café. Take a few moments to close your eyes and just listen. Notice the rhythm, the tempo, and the emotion it brings up in you — excitement, calm, nostalgia, joy.
Psychologists call this embodied listening: when you let sound move through you rather than analyse it (Schafer, The Soundscape, 1977). It’s not about hearing words or notes — it’s about how your body feels in response.
Painting sound into colour
Now, translate that feeling to the page. Don’t overthink it — just let your brush or pencil move as the sound moves you. Fast, staccato beats might become jagged lines and splashes of bright red. Slow, sweeping strings might turn into flowing curves of blues and purples.
Research has shown that music activates the same emotional centres in the brain that respond to visual art (Blood & Zatorre, PNAS, 2001). This means when you combine the two, you’re strengthening those neural pathways — essentially training your brain to express emotion more freely.
There’s no right or wrong here. What matters is that you’re translating feeling into form — not to represent the sound, but to express your response to it.
Why it helps you feel calmer
Creating in this way is deeply regulating. A 2016 study from the American Psychological Association found that art-making, even for just 45 minutes, significantly reduces cortisol levels — our main stress hormone. When you add music into that mix, your parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” response) activates even more effectively, lowering anxiety and improving mood.
It’s also a powerful way to release emotions you can’t always name. Sound connects directly to the limbic system — the brain’s emotional hub — bypassing language. So, painting to music helps you “speak” in colour and texture instead of words.
Try this: The five-song challenge
If you’re looking for a simple starting point, try this five-song exercise:
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Choose five contrasting tracks. Something joyful, something sad, something calm, something dramatic, and one that feels personally meaningful.
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Set a timer for 5 minutes per song. Create a quick expressive painting or sketch for each one.
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Don’t judge, just respond. Move your brush, scribble, splash, blend — whatever the sound calls for.
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Observe afterwards. Lay the five pieces out. Notice patterns — are there recurring colours for certain moods?
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Reflect in your journal. What surprised you about how you translated sound into sight?
Over time, you’ll start to notice connections — maybe you paint sadness in deep blues or calmness in light greens. You’ll begin to build your own emotional colour map.
Art and sound as self-connection
Kandinsky, one of the first artists to explore sound and colour, believed that “colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings.” When you paint what you hear, you’re tuning your soul to the rhythm of the world around you — and to your own inner symphony.
So next time you’re feeling stuck or heavy, try listening differently. Let the music flow through your brush. You might just find your emotions softening, your body relaxing, and your creativity reigniting — one note, one colour, one heartbeat at a time.
The cover photo is of my Grandad, an artist. He painted, built guitars and played them too!
This post is a collaborative effort between AI and myself in order to work a little bit faster.
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