The Sounds of Colour

Tomorrow is relaunch day y’all!! So tonight I’m popping on just to give you guys a run down of how things will work and some insightful backstory so that you guys can better understand a lot of the new brand things! Enjoy!

“Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” [Wikipedia definition]

Over the years Heather and I have spent countless hours in the dye shop together. I’ve had the pleasure of watching her do her art and have seen first hand how much music clearly inspires her. Every once in a while she’d get super excited about a colour and say “oh my gosh! Look! Doesn’t this LOOK like -insert song here-!?” And I would just nod because I totally had no clue what she meant by that but the colour was beautiful regardless. I didn’t give those moments much thought until a few months ago.
While talking about how much music inspired her art and how she wanted Tangled Poets to reflect that, she said, “most of the time I’m just listening to music and all of a sudden a couple notes play and I just see the colours and go” and INSTANTLY, I got it. I have spent my entire life in the visual arts scene as an artist and have known a couple fellow painters with synesthesia along the way, so I knew right away what she was talking about. I stopped her mid sentence and just went “what did you just say!? Oh my god that makes so much sense!!” Confused, she asked me what I was talking about. So I spent some time explaining it and she was shocked to learn that not everyone actually SEES sounds. We spent all afternoon talking about synesthesia, about how she hates jarring noises like alarms and sirens because the colours are too overwhelming, about the other people I knew with this ability that were also artists, and mostly about how she seriously couldn’t believe that I DIDN’T see what she was seeing.

At this point we had already decided that Heather’s life long love of music was going to play a big part in the brand and the relaunch. However, Heather had also spent a lot of the pandemic falling in love with her art again and wanted to use the relaunch as an opportunity to be more vulnerable and authentic within her brand (something that took a lot of mental gymnastics by the way, so I’m super proud of her). That’s when I got an idea.

Experts don’t have an exact estimate on how prevalent synesthesia is within the population because they rely solely on people with synesthesia self reporting and many of them have no idea obviously! The most common estimate among university/population studies however, is 4% of the population. To put that in perspective, we have 3,392 followers on the Aberdeen’s Instagram as I type this. That means that statistically, less than 150 of those followers have some form of synesthesia (yes there’s numerous forms!). Knowing that it’s also extremely unlikely that ALL of those 150 people have the type of synesthesia that Heather does (seeing sounds as colours), we’re looking at, at best, about 50 of those 3,392 followers have similar experiences as her. 

So I thought, what if there was some way we could share that experience even a little bit with the people like me, who DON’T see it? I personally always love watching Heather in her creative space with her music too. And that’s when I thought of the tags! Heather mentioned wanting to create playlists to share with everyone (we are, I’ll get to that) and that’s when I remembered the cool code feature that Spotify came out with a while back. So I designed the tags, found a quick song code for something random off my Spotify and showed Heather. I ran it by a couple of my fellow art and design friends as well and all of them immediately got it when I explained it; “oh my god! So you can listen to the colour!”. Exactly.

Now, those of us without synesthesia can quickly scan the tag within the Spotify app and LISTEN to the colour! I know personally, Heather has already dyed quite a few colours that had me going “THAT’S what you saw?! That’s so cool! How!?” and for songs I had heard so many times before! So I’m insanely excited for you guys to be able to interact with your colours and learn a little bit about the cool phenomenon that is synesthesia! 

Another reason we wanted to include these tags and explain them to you guys is because of the pandemic. We are at our core, a group of artists. We have however been lucky enough to continue our art basically uninterrupted throughout the pandemic. We’re still able to create and sell things throughout lockdowns. The gig community and music community has not been so fortunate. Many of them haven’t played any form of event or show in two years now. Some of them were able to release albums, but weren’t able to do the usual touring and advertising associated with that release. We believe strongly in supporting other artists when you can. So we wanted to be able to include these amazing artists in a way that actually got you interacting with their music, not just us casually telling you the song in an Instagram caption. So when you scan one song, don’t stop there! Check out what that artist has to offer, what they’ve released over the pandemic, what they’re currently up to and so on! Who knows, maybe you'll find a new artist you love! 

So what does this have to do with the rest of the launch? Everything! 
The whole brand will be nothing but 100% authentic Heather and her love for music, colour and art. Building off that, we’ll be releasing a colour every single day. Yes you read that right, a NEW colour EVERY DAY. These colours will be one of a kind, limited quantity colours. We will release them each day at noon (or earlier if we feel like it!) and there will be only 20 skeins available. That’s it. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. 
Then, each Thursday we’ll release a playlist on our Tangled Poets Spotify account with all of the songs for the colours that week (the Spotify is being added to our link tree, don’t worry!). So this week will obviously be a short week but all future weeks will have 7 songs for 7 days of colours. 
In addition to this, starting next Thursday, the 16th (because this week is short) we’ll also be releasing “full week” kits. These are limited quantity as well! There will be ONE kit consisting of 7 full skeins (one from every day that week) and 8 mini skein kits (7 mini skeins, one from each day of the week). Then on the Friday, it starts up all over again! 

Outside of these daily colours, random things Heather has dyed for fun, tonal colours, kits, etc. Will all still be available for purchase, they just won’t have the Spotify tag (that’ll remain exclusive to the daily song colours). These items and the daily colours will all be found in the Tangled Poets section of the Aberdeen’s website!

We also have more fun things that we’ll be releasing as the weeks go on! But for now, get ready for tomorrow’s colour (it’s a seriously good one honestly) and I can’t wait for you to see all the super cool music themed things we’ve been creating!

Thanks for listening to my artist rambling! See you tomorrow for day 1! 

Sydney :)