synesthesia
Oh man, I'm not the only one who sees music!!

No one's ever TOLD me I was crazy when I said that I could see music and that all sounds have colors... but I'm sure that more than a few people have thought it. When I see music I don't just see colors, sometimes I see much more... it has an essence.

I didn't know there was a name for it, much less a condition and that it's experienced by about 1 in every 25,000 people. I am special after all!

I don't associate color with letters but I do associate sound with memory, and smell. I can never remember names and faces, NEVER. But I can always remember sounds and smells.

Read this article for a better idea of whether you might be a synesthese.

Here's some more info that is, at least, slightly relevant to me:

-Women synesthetes predominate. In the U.S. I found a ratio of 3:1 (Cytowic, 1989), while in the U.K. Baron-Cohen et al. (1993) found a female ratio of 8:1.

-Synesthetes are preponderantly non-right-handed. Additional features (see below) are consistent with anomalous cerebral dominance. (I'm a righty though)

-Not only do most synesthetes contend that their memories are excellent, but cite their parallel sensations as the cause, saying for example, "I know it's 2 because it's white." Conversation, prose passages, movie dialogue, and verbal instructions are typical subjects of detailed recall. The spatial location of objects is also strikingly remembered, such as the precise location of kitchen utensils, furniture arrangements and floor plans, books on shelves, or text blocks in a specific book. Perhaps related to this observation is a tendency to prefer order, neatness, symmetry, and balance. Work cannot commence until the desk is arranged just so, or everything in the kitchen is put away in its proper place. Synesthetes perform in the superior range of the Wechsler Memory Scale (especially relevent is the neatness thing, and visualization)

-Within their overall high intelligence, synesthetes have uneven cognitive skills. While a minority are frankly dyscalculic, the majority may have subtle mathematical deficiencies (such as lexical-to-digit transcoding). (HA HA, that explains it. I'm not a dumbass after all.)

-As a group, synesthetes seem more prone to "unusual experiences" than one might expect (17% in my 1989 study, though if anyone knows what the general-population baseline for unusual experiences is, I should like to know). Qualitatively, one thinks of the personality constellation said to be typical of temporal-limbic epileptics. Deja vu, clairvoyance, precognitive dreams, a sense of portentousness, and the feeling of a presence are encountered often enough. Singular instances in my experience include empathic healing, and an explanans of psychokinesis for what was probably an explanandrum of episodic metamorphopsia.

-From the above, it seems that for most people synesthesia is ineffable, that which by definition cannot be imparted to others or adequately put into words. It might seem impossible at first for science to scrutinize a phenomenon whose "quality" must be experienced first-hand. (Yup.)