ArticlePerception2026
Increased prevalence of synaesthesia in musicians.
Article in Perception, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although synaesthesia has been linked to increased creativity and engagement with the arts, most of the evidence has come from visual arts rather than music. Here we show for the first time that synaesthesia is far more prevalent in musicians than non-musicians (an odds ratio of about 4). We show that this result holds true for all three different kinds of synaesthesia that we considered (grapheme-colour, sequence-space, sound-colour) including for types of synaesthesia unrelated to music. That is, it is not simply the case that the ability to 'see' music drives the higher prevalence, although this may have a role. Instead, we speculate that the cognitive profile of synaesthetes is conducive to musicality. We provide an estimate of the prevalence of sound-colour synaesthesia in non-musicians of between 0.3% and 1.3%, depending on the threshold applied, with comparable figures for musicians of 1.3% to 7.3%.
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