Bright yellow ellipses in an organ concert and singing in tones of green – this is how intensely the music teacher experiences aspects of her synesthetic color perception. She is the only one in her family who sees colors so expressively with other sensory stimuli. Since her childhood, Ina Herkenhoff already associated each letter with a specific color, e.g. the letter “I” with yellow. She gave her son a “golden” name.
I’d love to sing something in purple, but that’s not possible. I like the color green best, because it’s lovely and suits me well.
Ina = yellow – green – red. In grapheme color synesthesia, letters of the alphabet (among other things) are firmly linked to specific color effects. This kind of synesthetic perception is apparent from an early age, for example, when a synesthetically predisposed child learns the alphabet or writes their name and automatically reaches for colored pencils corresponding to the color a specific letter triggers. Experience Ina Herkenhoff’s colored alphabet here.