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The snow was falling softly in moonlit Vienna, Austria, making eight-year-old Hannah’s plan to be quiet a little easier.
Earlier that evening at dinner, Grandfather had read her the newspaper story about the scientists who just discovered giraffes humming at night in three zoos throughout her city. She could hardly contain her excitement.
Hannah wanted to hear a new sound. (Well, it wasn’t exactly new, was it, since giraffes are not new!) What was new is humans had finally paid enough attention to the tall animals to notice they hum each other to sleep in quiet, deep tones: https://soundcloud.com/new-scientist/giraffes-humming.
Hannah had a special gift. She saw colored shapes for every sound she heard — a set of bonus senses called synesthesia. And since she was old enough to hold a crayon, and later, a paintbrush, she had catalogued these colored sounds in a special tablet Grandfather had bought her for Christmas. It was their little secret as when she tried to talk about this to other members of her family and her school friends, they found her strange. Grandfather, on the contrary, asked her to list them all. So the book was now filled with the watercolor indigo cloud of his car horn; the silver triangles of her bicycle bell and the peach colored waves of her favorite violin section in a Viennese waltz. She wondered what colors and shapes a completely new sound might inspire?
