Melissa McCracken – American artist-abstractionist. The artist is not engaged in quite ordinary creativity. With the help of her paintings, she visualizes sounds and music. She does this not just by intuition or in accordance with her creative vision. The fact is that Melissa has a very unusual deviation, which in medicine is called synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is very rare and consists in the fact that a person does not feel the world in the same way as other people. In this artist, the synaesthesia is expressed in that she literally sees what she hears. Sounds, music, speech and so on, everything that is picked up by the hearing aid is displayed in her visual center and as a result she constantly sees unusual “for ordinary people” visual pictures.
Melissa McCracken, up to the age of 15, was sure that all the rest of the people see this world and did not even suspect that her visual hearing is a very rare deviation or even a gift. In the world, there are several forms of synaesthesia, when feelings are combined, for example, color hearing, like Melissa, or vice versa – visual images that transform into sounds, or taste synaesthesia, when visual images or sounds become taste qualities. When Melissa McCracken realized that her sound vision was very rare, she decided to show people how she sees the world of music with the help of abstract paintings.
