Synaesthetics often experience correspondences between the shades of color, tone of sounds, and intensity of taste that they assosiate with an alternate sensation. For instance, a synaestetic may see a more intense red as the pitch of a sound gets higher, or a smoother surface might make one taste a sweeter taste.
Synaesthesia has influenced many artists in various fields, including poets Charles-Pierre Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and composer Alexander Scriabin. In his orchestral work, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), Scriabin included a part for a "clavier à lumières". This instrument was played like the piano, but produced colored light instead of sound.
Alexander Scriabin may have been, but probably wasn't, a synesthete. The color system he described and which he used in pieces such as Prometheus, unlike most systems and synesthetic experience, line up with the circle of fifths, indicating that it was a thought out system that was also influenced by his theosophic readings, and based on Sir Isaac Newton's Optics. Many other artists have used fabricated synesthetic systems including the Italian futurists including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Kandinsky.
Amy Beach was a synesthete, seeing different colors for different keys, as well as possesing absolute pitch. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Olivier Messiaen were quite likely also synesthetes. Contemporary postminimal composer Michael Torke is a synesthete, who, in addition to composing a series of "color" pieces based on his perceptions, also perceives colors for various time units. French drummer Manu Katché and world renowned oboist Jennifer Paull are both synesthetes, Katche seeing various images with music, and Paull seeing an expanded unexplainable spectrum to various sounds, the sensation of the oboe compelling her to take it up.
The works of writer Vladimir Nabokov contain many synaesthetic descriptions, and the physicist Richard Feynman admitted to seeing the algebraic symbols of Bessel functions in colour.
As digital entertainment becomes more developed, the possibility of synaesthesia through technology has begun to be considered. Several video games already use the term in their advertising, most notably the 2001 Playstation 2 game REZ (which does have some elements of synaesthesia in its gameplay, notably the interaction of controller vibration, music, player interaction and graphics).
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