A one-man synesthetic cover band

Through a phenomenon called synesthesia, many talented musicians associate notes, or key signatures, with colors: in their mind's eye, at least, they see the music the rest of us only hear. (In classical music, Franz Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov were both famous synesthetes.)

A New York artist named Erik Rosen, previously unblessed with this ability, developed synesthesia during a harrowing bout with lymphoma. After a stem-cell transplant operation last fall, at Sloan-Kettering, he was confined to a sterile room for a month, nodding from the effects of morphine, accompanied only by an iPod dock he'd recently gotten as a gift. At one point, as the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" played, the song's notes and sonic textures began to flash for him on the white wall of his room, he says. And it kept happening, song after song. "The notes," he writes, "echoed against the white masonry in an opiate-laden kaleidoscope of colors."

Post-recovery, Rosen embarked on creating software that would render images that offered a decent approximation of what he was seeing. Vaguely suggestive of modernist paintings, Rosen's printed images are rectangular, composed of rows of smaller boxes. Read from left to right, the width of each box represents the length of a note, while color suggests pitch. An exhibition of Rosen's work, featuring such songs as "Hey Jude," "Satisfaction," and "Positively 4th Street," is on display through mid-July in the Condé Nast building, in Times Square.

Rosen also sells his prints via a Web site, cnoteart.com. And he'll even do requests. Which makes him something like a synesthetic version of a wedding band, no?

Via Allerton's Point