EXPLAINER: They ‘see’ music, smell colours, feel flavour. What’s it like to have synaesthesia?
“Zinia is a composer who literally sees her music take shape. But it’s not just artists who experience this rare “crossover of the senses”. How does it work?” Read article by Jackson Graham, The Age & The Sydney Morning Herald
REVIEWS
“From its fanfare-like introduction to solo pleasantries of harp and piccolo linking sections, there was an evolving rhythmic development as patterns shifted around sections of the orchestra, with exciting staccato phrases and crescendos proving Chan’s fine sense of balance and refined orchestration” – Classic Melbourne, 2025
“Chan has turned her own composition, Gaze Upon the Liquid Sky, into a virtual-reality scene to give people a sense of her inner world. She has created a night sky with bright pink stars sparking from a burning bright mass. Pastel blue stars shimmer within arm’s length. Soft oboe and piano play alongside birdsong and crickets. It’s like walking in a planetarium, only this is her colourful universe.”- The Age & The Sydney Morning Herald, 2024
“It can look a bit like Gustav Klimt’s famous painting The Kiss…“When I’m listening to music, I would naturally be drawn towards certain textures or colours, and then I would just select those colours and see where it goes.” More often than not, her main impulse is to associate particular feelings with sounds, giving another layer to the mental images she conjures up. And occasionally, if music moves her emotionally, she sees projected colours in her vision and not just in her mind’s eye….” - The Age & The Sydney Morning Herald, 2024
“Well-articulated… a musically thoughtful and intricate work. Certainly a good representation of the rich possibilities of the Australian electroacoustic palate.”- 2023 Arts Music Awards Judges, APRA AMCOS and Australian Music Centre
“Zinia Chan’s work Gaze Upon the Liquid Sky was a stunning bookend… A strong use of electronics allowed for the acoustic instruments to become part of the soundscape; Chan melded the natural noises of the outside world with electronic sounds and the oboe and piano performing live. One became the other, and if you closed your eyes, you could feel the wind shifting the trees, the frogs croaking, the crickets singing out. - Limelight Magazine 2022
“… hauntingly beautiful.”- ArtsHub 2021
