What music looks like as art

These works explore how music can be seen as well as heard, inviting viewers to experience what sound looks like through painting.

How I Experience Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is often described as a blending of the senses, but for me it feels more like a quiet dialogue- sound, colour, movement, and emotion speaking to one another in a language that is fluid, intuitive, and deeply personal. I don’t try to paint synaesthesia literally. Instead, I translate the way it shapes my perception of the world.

When I listen to music, I experience colour, texture, and movement as vividly as the sound itself. A single note might arrive as a soft wash of blue; a chord progression might ripple through me as layered golds or deep greens. Rhythm becomes motion. Emotion becomes atmosphere. These sensations form the foundation of my work.

Translating Sound Into Visual Form

My paintings begin with listening; not just hearing the music, but letting it settle in my body and mind. As a synaesthetic artist, I experience sound as colour, texture, and movement, and I use this to paint music as visual form.

I pay attention to the textures that rise: smooth, sharp, shimmering, heavy. These impressions guide my palette and the way I build each composition, creating music-inspired abstract paintings that translate sound into colour.

I work in layers, allowing colour to accumulate the way sound does. Sweeping gestures, circular forms, fine linework, patterns, graded colour; each mark reflecting rhythm, tone, and intensity.

Each artwork becomes a sensory map: a visual interpretation of sound, emotion, and movement, capturing what music feels like beyond hearing.

Colour, Movement & Atmosphere

Colour is the most immediate expression of my synaesthetic experience. Certain sounds evoke specific hues with absolute clarity and visual impact, warm ochres, soft blues, luminous pinks, deep greens and abundant purple.. These colours don’t feel chosen; they feel revealed.

Movement is equally important. Sound rarely feels still to me. It expands, contracts, pulses, or drifts. In my paintings, this becomes layered motion, shifting forms, and atmospheric transitions.

Texture adds depth to the sensory experience. Some sounds feel smooth and fluid; others feel rough or fragmented. Through glazing, layering, and fine detail, I try to capture these nuances.

Why I Paint Through Synaesthesia

My synaesthesia is not a technique - it’s a way of experiencing the world. Painting allows me to give form to the unseen, to express the internal landscapes that shape how I move through sound and emotion and the world.

My hope is that viewers feel invited into that space. Not necessarily to experience synaesthesia themselves, but to connect with the emotional resonance behind the work - the movement, the atmosphere, the feeling.

Explore My Synaesthesia‑Inspired Artworks

Each painting is a moment of sound made visible - a quiet crossing of senses, held in colour and light.

Abstract painting by Tanja Ackerman featuring layered red, purple, and white textures with vertical drips and linear upward strokes, inspired by synaesthetic colour and movement

Synaesthesia

Where sound dissolves into colour and feeling becomes form, my synaesthesia finds its voice.

I create music-inspired paintings, turning songs into visual form.

Pink Floyd has been a profound creative influence in my life, not only musically but visually. I was eleven when I experienced a complete listen through on vinyl of The Wall—a listening moment that changed me.

The sound arrives in my mind as colour, atmosphere, and movement, shaping the way I experience the world through Synesthesia. The Great Gig in the Sky in particular rises in me as a wave of luminous emotion: expansive, layered, and deeply human.

My synaesthetic response allows me to paint music as abstract visual landscapes, transforming sound into colour, movement, and feeling. Painting these sensations allows me to honour the sound-to-colour connection that continues to inspire my work. Pink Floyd’s music remains one of the strongest catalysts in my creative practice, guiding both palette and emotion.

This work explores how music can be seen as well as heard, capturing what sound looks like through abstract painting.

Pink Floyd’s music has always moved through me as colour and feeling, a quiet current that shapes the way I paint