Dr Caroline Curwen

I graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music as a clarinettist in 1993, but tendonitis in my right hand put a stop to my playing. I retrained as a chartered accountant and did not consider music again until much later in life when my children began to learn to play musical instruments at school. 

I experience a sensation of colour in my ‘mind’s eye’ associated with musical keys, timbre and entire pieces of music. However, it wasn’t until I acquired my MA in Psychology of Music from Sheffield University in 2016, that I discovered that my experience with music was a form of synaesthesia also known as chromesthesia, or coloured hearing. My Masters dissertation examined music-colour synaesthesia and musical memory and inspired me to continue my research at doctoral level. I received my PhD from the University of Sheffield with a thesis entitled Music-colour synaesthesia: A conceptual correspondence grounded in action.

From 2021 I was Graduate Teaching Assistant on the MA Distance Learning Music Psychology in Education, Performance and Wellbeing (Masters Modules). In the first half of 2022 I was employed as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on an AHRC funded project “Investigating the Impact of Covid-19 on Arts and Culture in South Yorkshire. I now teach at Sheffield on the Psychology of Music Masters and Undergraduate programmes.