by Adam Parrish
Vladimir Nabokov, a noted Russian-American writer, claims to have experienced letters as colors. "I present a fine case of colored hearing," he claims in his memoir, Speak, Memory; although "[p]erhaps "hearing" is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline" (34). Nabokov goes on to give a detailed mapping of letters to colors (e.g., "[t]he word for rainbow ... is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv" [35]), and I have adapted that mapping to produce the tool below. Input a text, and each letter in the text will be transformed into a solid field of color: the color that Nabokov would have perceived upon seeing that letter.
The format and layout of the text will be preserved as well as possible. Any character not explicitly given a color value (e.g., numbers, punctuation), will be left unmolested. Like Nabokov's synaesthesia, the tool is insensitive to case.