I spend weeks putting this thing together in time for the inauguration of the year’s warm weather. It’s a big deal for me.

Once I notice that red line of the outdoor thermometer begin to climb — who am I kidding, more like ‘once my phone starts showing more little orange sun icons‘— I’ll take the previous year’s playlist to use as my foundation. I start with a ritual culling of played-out tracks that don’t quite fit on this go around. Then it’s time to retrofit the empty space with new music.

However, this is where things get a bit tricky.

At this point, I’m tasked with reflecting on how my taste in music has changed over the course of the year. What new artists have I listened to? Which artists have grown to be a routinely skipped portion of an all-library shuffle? Most importantly, though, is: how do you pick out music that synthesizes the tactile sensations of sticky, sweaty summer down into a singular soundscape?

To delve into how that monumental task is accomplished, I want to introduce you to Johannes Itten, who performed landmark research on — in a way even he didn’t expect — the question we just posed.

Before we go there, though, if you’re enjoying this write-up on how perception affects the music we listen to, give it a clap and follow Doubletime for regular editorials on similar subjects.

Johannes Itten was a Swiss color theorist and artist who utilized his students as guinea pigs in search of a link between colors and the seasons. In doing so, he helped spawn ‘seasonal color analysis,’ a tool used in the fashion and cosmetics industries.

In his research, Itten would poll students for what colors they would use to characterize a chosen season. Pick a season, and pick the color you would associate with it. Itten found through these Q&A sessions that rarely would any two students give the same answer. Critically, however, when the participants would swap answers with a partner, each student was found to be capable of picking the season their fellow classmate was depicting of almost 100% of the time.

“I have never yet found anyone who failed to identify each or any season correctly… this convinces me that above individual taste, there is a high judgment in man… one which… overrules mere sentimental prejudice”

Itten was researching the subject in the pursuit of higher artistic heights. He sought an answer to why this phenomenon occurs in order to grasp at the illusive, bigger picture of how we ape cousins perceive creative expression at our most base rudiments. What Itten was less-than-scientifically tap-dancing around was a concept known as synesthesia.

Before you tab out, let me Google that for you.

Syn·es·the·si·a (sin’es-thē’zē-ă), 1. A condition in which a stimulus, in addition to exciting the usual and normally located sensation, gives rise to a subjective sensation of different character or localization; for example, color hearing, color taste.

Don’t worry — I’m not just going to drop a Merriam-Webster and leave you hanging.

Synesthesia, stripped away of all of the dense dictionary verbiage, is the result of the brain crossing up the red and blue wires. A rogue frequency triggers a feeling of phantom touch and simultaneously comes to be known as auditory-tactile synesthesia. When picturing the letter ‘A,’ is it red? Synesthetic associations made it so, if so, and is referred to as grapheme-color synesthesia. If those aren’t doing it for you, there are yet-to-be-investigated forms of synesthesia out there— perhaps, then, the lab coats have yet to pick out a name for your own brand of synesthetic associations.

In fact, some (totally credible-looking) websites claim that there are over 80 different mutations of synesthesia. Go ahead; pick one out. Try it on. See if it fits.