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The Israeli animator and artist Michal Levy is among the roughly 3 per cent of people who experience synaesthesia – a neurological condition in which people have a recurring sensory overlap, such as ‘tasting’ words or envisioning letters and numbers each with their own inherent colour. Levy possesses one of the most common forms of the condition, chromaesthesia, in which sounds and music provoke visuals. For her short film Giant Steps, Levy set out to convey her audiovisual experience of the John Coltrane composition ‘Giant Steps’ (1959). The resulting short animation is at once an intriguing window into the sensory world of a person with synaesthesia and an audiovisual delight, as Coltrane’s rollicking notes elicit a kinetic, cascading cityscape built from colourful blocks of sound.
To read more about synaesthesia, visit visit Aeon’s sister site, Psyche, a new digital magazine that illuminates the human condition through three prisms: mental health; the perennial question of ‘how to live’; and the artistic and transcendent facets of life.
Director: Michal Levy
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Gender
A catchy tune explains the world’s ‘isms’ – according to your mum doing the laundry
5 minutes
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Consciousness and altered states
‘I want me back’ – after a head injury, Nick struggles with his altered reality
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
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Film and visual culture
A lush animated opus evokes the frenzied pace of modern life
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Making
Forging a cello from pieces of wood demands its own form of virtuosity
27 minutes
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Physics
The rhythms of a star system inspire a pianist’s transfixing performance
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Pleasure and pain
The volunteer musicians who perform in the aftermath of violence and tragedy
12 minutes
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Cities
A lush, whirlwind tribute to the diversity of life in a northern English county
3 minutes
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Music
The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation
3 minutes