Cyborg makes art using seventh sense

Liz Else, associate opinion editor

(Image: Dan Wilton/RedBulletin)

Neil Harbisson can only see shades of grey. So his prosthetic eyepiece, which he calls an ?eyeborg?, interprets the colours for him and translates them into sound. Harbisson?s art sounds like a kind of inverse synaesthesia. But where synaesthetes experience numbers or letters as colours or even ?taste? words, for example, Harbisson?s art is down to a precise transposition of colour into sound frequencies. As a result, he is able to create facial portraits purely out of sound, and he can tell you that the colour of Mozart?s music is mostly yellow. Liz Else caught up with him at the TEDGlobal conference.

When did you realise you were colour blind?
When I was a kid they noticed that I had a big problem with colour blindness. They thought it was the normal red-green type, but it wasn't. Eventually, when I was 11 years old, they diagnosed me with achromatopsia, which means I can only see shades of grey. About one in 33,000 people have this type of colour blindness.

What is the gadget you are wearing?
It's a sensor that lets me ?see? colours.

How does it work?
Colour is basically hue, saturation, and light. Right now, I can see light in shades of grey, but I can?t see its saturation or hue. This gadget detects the light?s hue, and converts the light into a sound frequency that I can hear as a note [wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency so it can easily convert the wavelength of the light into a sound frequency].
It also translates the saturation of the colour into volume. So if it?s a vivid red I will hear it more loudly.

All the translation happens in a chip on the back of my neck - it's all held by pressure onto the bone. It stays there all the time when I go to bed. In September I'm having it osteointegrated - which means that part of the device will be put inside my bone in a hospital in Barcelona and then the sound will resonate much better then. It took a year to convince them that it was ethical and part of me.

How long did it take you to learn how to use it?
About five weeks but it was five weeks of 24/7. After five weeks my headaches went away and it became automatic. That was in 2004. Now it feels normal.

What is it like? Your world must look very different.
It?s like an extra sense, a seventh sense. It?s not synaesthesia. Synaesthetes see colour. I never do. I hear it through bone and see beyond the normal.

Can you go beyond the normal range of the 300 or so visible hues?
I can do infrared spectrum - I see colour that is invisible, like some of the animals that see at night. And also ultraviolet. The thing about UV is that it?s good to detect it because it damages the skin and I can detect it. I can build a picture that no one else sees.

Tell me about your art
I create sound from colours. Suppose I look at a dark plum. I see it as a light frequency and this frequency corresponds to a note. And the eyeborg, as I call it, lets me hear that note - anywhere between E and F in microtones. That makes it easy to see the dominant colour.

And I can create art from sounds by transposing sound into notes and therefore into colour. This a physical relationship between sound and colour, it?s neither arbitrary nor is it synesthesia.

So, what is the colour of Mozart?
Yellow. So is Bach. But Beethoven is more purple and blue. Vivaldi's The Four seasons is interesting - spring is very colourful, winter starts very blue, and summer is yellow...autumn is colourful too. Rachmaninov is red and blue, Cage is black and white!

You create portraits too - how?
I create portraits live by pointing at the different skin tone hues on the different parts of the face, so I can create the chord of a face. I call them sound portraits but I'm thinking of calling them sonochromatic portraits.

I also did the opposite, creating colour portraits from voices. I did Martin Luther King and Hitler in colour from their speeches and showed them to people and asked them to guess which was which.

What happened?
People got them wrong! The very colourful one was Hitler because his speech was colourful and used many tones. Martin Luther King was more one tone and ended up being very purple and blue.

Do some people "look/sound" good? And do others "look/sound" the same"
It depends on the colour. Prince Charles and Nicole Kidman both sounded good. It?s to do with their faces having the same colours on some part of the faces.

What's the potential for future applications?
For my art, I can upgrade the chips to see into the mid and far infrared for example.
For the rest of the world, there are all sorts of possibilities. You could get kids to eat more vegetables, for example, by assembling food according to your choice of a song. So you'd take the notes and turn them into colours and then arrange the food accordingly. And we could even have a restaurant where you could ask to eat a salad made up of colours from, say, the song Imagine. I have no idea how that would turn out!

Here at TED they called you a sonochromatic artist cyborg. What on earth is that?
They refer to me as a cyborg because the cybernetic device I wear is part of my body. It really simplifies things. Sonochronmatic means the art that I do is related to sound and colour. Sonochromatic is a term I created because I didn't want this to be confused with synesthesia.

But I don't usually introduce myself like this!

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/20d90984/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A120C0A60Ccyborg0Emakes0Eart0Eusing0Eseventh0Esense0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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