At its center is Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry and eloquence. Her red hair, piercing gaze, and adorned presence mark her as both oracle and narrator—a figure who doesn’t just inspire music, but gives it mythic voice. She joins the tragic muse Melpomene, seen in another work, as one of only two muses who made it into the final series. Their presence threads the project with ancient resonance.

Nearby, the number 42 appears in a textured green-and-blue circle—styled like an Ishihara test, used to diagnose color blindness. But here, it’s a psychedelic cipher: a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its famously absurd answer to “life, the universe, and everything.” The number becomes a portal—visible only to those tuned into the right frequency.

The front is layered with mythic figures, geometric grids, and chromatic bursts—each element referencing the perceptual distortions and symbolic overlays of psychotropic experience. Running along the side of the guitar, a line of visual-only braille dots spells out the countercultural mantra: Turn on, tune in, drop out. It’s a message meant for touch, rendered for sight—a sensory inversion that mirrors the guitar’s entire ethos.

The reverse features the Tree of Life from the Kabbalah—ten interconnected sefirot representing spiritual emanations. But it’s not floating in abstraction. It’s overlaid on an anatomical diagram of a human hand. Gesture becomes divine. Touch becomes transmission. The hand is the performer, the creator, the mystic. Lightning-like streaks and grid motifs surround it, suggesting that rock & roll, too, is a mystical circuit—chaotic, structured, embodied.

Above the Tree of Life, perched on either side of the horn, are two white figures drawn from the Aztec Book of the Dead. Likely referencing deities such as Mictlantecuhtli or Mictecacihuatl, they serve as twin sentinels—guardians of transformation and mythic passage. In Aztec cosmology, death is not an end—it’s a crossing. Here, they frame the spiritual architecture below, anchoring the guitar in ancestral resonance.

And across the body, patchy “leopard spot” areas reveal the guitar’s original burnt orange metallic finish—the only instrument in the series to show its original skin. These exposed fragments were created by rubbing away the base coats with alcohol, like a visual x-ray. It’s a gesture of reverence and rupture: the myth layered over the machine, the past bleeding through the present.

The Synesthete is fully functional, but its message transcends playability. It invites the viewer to experience music not just through the ears, but through the eyes, the skin, the soul. It’s a guitar that doesn’t just make sound—it makes meaning.