The Application of Synesthetic Principles to Foster Musical Creativity

In 2014, the National Association for Music Education released music standards that strongly emphasized creativity, encouraging teachers to find new ways to implement creative activities into their classrooms. As such, making cross-modal associations and emphasizing divergent thinking are important priorities for teachers to consider. Synesthesia involves involuntary cognitive connections between senses (e.g., color and sound) that many people experience. The principles of this condition can be applied to all music learners, and building instructional approaches from them could help students make these unique associations and use divergent thinking to ultimately become more creative music makers.