I first met Jacqueline in the basement of Pomona’s Thatcher music building. I had just finished playing a wobbly cover of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film)” when I heard an incessant knocking at the door.
Pulling it open, I found myself face-to-face with a girl from the practice room next door. She was wearing a silver Radiohead pendant around her neck and was smiling from ear to ear.
“I just need to say, I love Radiohead,” she said. “This is going to sound weird, but do you happen to experience colors when you listen to their music?”
Jacqueline, a music major in her senior year at Pomona, is herself no stranger to this phenomenon. She’s had synesthesia — a neurological condition that allows people to experience multiple senses simultaneously — for her entire musical career.
“I first realized I had synesthesia in general when I was eight,” Jacqueline later told me. “I was so excited to turn eight years old, because the number eight is a very pretty teal.”
A synesthesia battery test confirmed that she was a synesthete, although it wasn’t until her sophomore year of high school that Jacqueline discovered her musical chromesthesia. She was in the midst of playing Rachmainoff’s Prelude in G Minor when the realization hit her.
“I just had this thought, like, this piece is so insane,” she said. “It changes straight from deep red to blue and green. And then I was wondering, is this another kind of synesthesia that I have?”
Jacqueline’s chromesthesia allows her to see different colors when she hears music. The Game of Thrones theme song is a medium red color. One of her favorite pieces in “Edward Scissorhands” is vividly light blue. “Hey There Delilah” is yellow.
But according to Jacqueline, her chromesthesia does more than just influence how she hears other artists’ music; it also helps her shape her own compositions.
She’s been composing music since she was ten years old, but she started releasing her pieces online in her junior year of high school. Now, as a college student studying music, she spends nearly all of her time composing.
“I’m pretty much composing constantly,” she said. “If I’m not by an instrument, I’ll just sing into an audio memo so that I won’t forget, and I’ll write things down in my notes on my phone.”
Jacqueline mainly writes instrumental pieces, describing her compositional style as a blend of neo-classical new wave, ambient, cinematic, and gothic classical music. She draws inspiration from artists and groups like Danny Elfman and Radiohead, using her work to create new musical worlds.
She released her debut commercial album, Singularity, in 2024, although she started working on some of the pieces as early as the year before. Each piece underwent a vastly different creative process, with Jacqueline thinking up one of the songs in a lucid dream. She had been trying to write an “orange piece” for awhile, but hadn’t had any luck.
“In a lucid dream, I basically created this color radio with all these colored buttons on the top, with the idea that each of those represented a station where a piece of that color was being played,” she said. “And then I pressed the orange button, and the main theme of ‘Amber Sky’ came out.”
Singularity has ten tracks in total, all of which are meant to help listeners envision a different kind of world.
“I definitely hope that people experience the album as a collection of musical worlds,” she said. “I want them to feel like they’re basically being teleported to another time or place.”
Jacqueline’s next album is set to come out sometime in the next few months. In the meantime, she’s beginning to think about life after graduation.
“I would love to write soundtracks for films that are just, you know, slightly bizarre, slightly creepy,” she said. “I just think writing for films that have a very unique feel to them, a very unique environment — I would totally thrive.”
As for other aspiring musicians, Jacqueline has one major piece of advice.
“Write music for yourself,” she said. “Don’t write it trying to be popular, trying to match the style that someone else did. Definitely just write music that has value to you.”
Jacqueline’s website can be found here.
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