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🎨 Synesthesia and the Psychoacoustics of Emotion

A chromesthesia lab: watch a melody spiral through 3D space as color, shaped live by tempo, major/minor mode, and timbre.

Psychoacoustics3DAdvanced60 FPS

A generated melody spirals through 3D space above a Scriabin-style pitch-color wheel, each note taking on the hue a chromesthete would "see" for that pitch — while tempo, mode, and timbre reshape the spiral's direction, speed, and texture in real time.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Chromesthesia's consistent pitch→color mapping, and the separate finding that major/minor mode and tempo reliably shift perceived emotional valence and arousal even without any synesthesia at all.

🎮 How to Use

Change tempo, mode, timbre, and root note to hear (visually) a different melody. Toggle synesthesia view off to see the same structure with color mapping removed — the non-synesthete's experience.

💡 Did You Know?

Composer Alexander Scriabin built an entire "color organ," Prometheus, assigning colors to keys almost a century before neuroscience began mapping chromesthesia in the brain.

⚙ Under the hood

A chromesthesia lab: watch a melody spiral through 3D space as color, shaped live by tempo, major/minor mode, and timbre.

sound designmusic visualizationcolor theoryemotion recognitionperceptionaudio-visualsynesthesiaThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install