Guardian With Synesthesia Paints Deep Stone Lullaby From Destiny 2

One Guardian on Twitter by the name of @Runesael has painted Deep Stone Lullaby with the help of their synesthesia. You might not have heard of that before. Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon that causes involuntary sensory or cognitive pathways to respond to different stimuli. In this case, the Guardian sees colours or pictures when they hear music. With Deep Stone Lullaby, they’ve captured what they see, and it’s beautiful.

I have synesthesia, and I paint music.

This is "Deep Stone Lullaby" from the Beyond Light OST.

[Yes, it is hard to do the spacewalk and listen to this. I still turn on my music every time. Hopefully now that I've painted it, I'll fall less.] @DestinyTheGame @Bungie pic.twitter.com/wLJTQa6FkS

— Runesael, Gensym Scribe (@Runesael) January 31, 2021

They originally shared their gorgeous artwork on Twitter, where the community went wild for it. I think it looks incredible particularly when you get into the little details like the blurring of the edges and the way that it looks like it’s moving.

It’s now had nearly 7,000 upvotes on Reddit and is still rising. They explained that this image took roughly 3 hours to create. While they do try to explain that the lows are low and highs are very high, I can’t make head nor tail of where the music comes into this image. I’m still very pleased that it’s been made though.

Something that I think all guardians should try to do is load up Deep Stone Lullaby, which you can find here, and play the music while looking at the image. I wonder how many of us will be able to see where the music fits in.

As for how this image came about? That’s a longer story. The Guardian did share a lengthy blog post here about how it all works for them. I’ll try to get the main points out for you here though.

This particular brand of synesthesia is known as associative chromesthesia. The Guardian doesn’t see particular notes or songs, but they get flashes of images when they hear specific tracks. So with Deep Stone Lullaby, they saw the image as they listened.

They add that some sounds can actually blind them, and bright lights can deafen them. All that sounds insane to me, but it’s what makes them such a special creator.

To put it into words, they actually see 3D images, but obviously this is a 2D one. They feel music more than they see it, though music does have colour and shape to them. The thing they identify is texture though, like the feel of running water. they then translate that to a colour and shape, and that’s how this was made.

Let us know what you think of this amazing image in the comments.