Emanuel Ax Quotes

Yeah, I associate every sound with a color and vice versa.

I can hear you and I can watch your mouth move, and then I put together the sounds and the visual image, and I can understand the words as I integrate the two signals.

What we learn only through the ears makes less impression upon our minds than what is presented to the trustworthy eye.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

It's not like I see colours. It's just, for me, an incredibly strong association between music and colour.

What we hear strikes the mind with less force than what we see.

I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange.

I learned in the computer game business early on that all senses are not equal. The best example is, you're listening to a radio play and you're driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven't seen the road in five minutes. It's because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically.

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

Hearing is a form of touch. You feel it through your body, and sometimes it almost hits your face.

In any battle between what the ear hears and what the eye sees, the eye wins every time.

I think sighted people let their eyes cheat them out of certain things. People who can see don't have a great sense of smell because they don't use it.

Art is really more musical than it is visual.

I associate colors with music, or music with colors.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

We find certains things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

I can actually see the sound in my head. I can actually see it... But each sound is different so this one has that sparkle, there is a sparkle to the sound.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.