I always knew that sounds elicit colours for me, but I used to think it was just one of those things everyone did and didn't talk about. My family's piano played gorgeously red velvet notes and when the garbage truck came by the machinery was delightfully brown.

Finally in high school in the late 90's, my music teacher described what synesthesia was. It wasn't very well known by the general public back then, and while there are at least 40 types of known synesthesia, she was only interested in something called pitch/colour synesthesia. Basically, different musical pitched elicit different colours. She had the trumpet player play a B flat and asked if anyone saw a colour. I was the only one who spoke up, and said it was orange. She got the trumpet player to play a D. I said it was still orange. My teacher looked at me funny, and I decided I was just overly imaginative. I tried to stop seeing and thinking about colours associated with sounds.

In university, I enjoyed participating in various studies the psych department would hold, and at one point I was set to be part of the control group for a study about synesthesia. I was in the non-synesthete group, but everyone was screened as part of the study, and after screening me, they decided to test me an it turns out I associate different sounds and different musical instruments with colors. Not quite the pitch/colour synesthesia my teacher was looking for.

So of course the trumpet was still orange! Trumpets are always orange, and strings are always blue, guitars are green, and piano is red.

Now that I finally knew that I wasn't imagining it all my life, it was very freeing. I started trying to put on paper the kinds of things I saw when listening to my favourite songs and found that making art digitally on a tablet was the closest way to get the vibrant colourscapes from my head out into a physical image. And this shop was born! I've listed a lot of songs that have beautiful imagery in my head, and I put them on cardstock and make them frame-ready. And don't worry if you're favourite song isn't listed - I take custom requests and will gladly send you your favourite song in your choice of sizes.