Analysis demonstrates high accuracy in predicting colour associations using machine learning algorithms in a synesthete.
Sound–colour synaesthesia is a rare phenomenon in which auditory stimuli automatically evoke stable, subjectively real colour experiences. This study aimed to investigate whether the colours most frequently reported by a synesthete can be reliably predicted based on objective acoustic parameters of voice signals. The study analysed the responses of a 24-year-old blind woman to different voices, which she consciously associates with distinct coloured silhouettes. A classification analysis based on MFCC acoustic feature sets and machine learning algorithms (SVM, XGBoost) demonstrated that the models could be trained with very high Accuracy—up to 97–100% in binary classification and 89–90% in multi-class classification. These results provide new insights into how specific sound characteristics are linked to imagery arising from the human subconscious.
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Bartulienė et al. (2025) studied this question.
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