The man who hears colour | Hacker News Reader

The man who hears colour

bbc.co.uk

71 pointsreacocard27 comments

Last year I was attacked by three policemen at a demonstration who thought I was filming them. I told them I was listening to colours, but they thought I was mocking them and tried to pull the camera off my head.

For some reason, this strikes me as particularly awful. Not that police don't want to be filmed, that's predictably repugnant for its own clear reasons. Its that they had no problem ripping a prosthesis off someone before even bothering to try to understand it because it looked different. What's next, wrestling old folk to the ground and ripping out their hearing aids because they might be recording devices? Will there be an unwritten "normalcy code" that disabled people will have to follow to avoid assault?

>Will there be an unwritten "normalcy code" that disabled people will have to follow to avoid assault?

You're lying to yourself if you honestly believe that doesn't exist today.

I expected yet another “synesthesia—isn’t it interesting!” article, and was pleasantly surprised. As a synesthete (grapheme→colour and sound→colour), I find that the topic has been done to death, and non-synesthetic writers tend to romanticise it to the point of outright misrepresentation. Anyway, the brain’s peculiar propensity for conflating senses seems to have proved useful for once. Props to this guy for hacking his brain to get around a stroke of bad genetic luck.

I agree that the topic gets written about often, and usually pretty terribly - but because of that I was hoping it was another "synesthesia - isn't it interesting!" article, just a rare good one.

I don't have it myself, but did study music with someone who had it, and since then it's always fascinated me.

Very cool!

Somewhat related: my main research area is actually in sonification (representing data through non-speech sound) - imagine listening to changes in the stock market through changes in pitch, or loudness, or tempo. We can use sonification for the visually impaired, communicating data and patterns in new places, as this guy has done. But we can also use it to revolutionize how we interact with computers - we can be mobile, multitasking, visually overloaded, and still process data through sonification. IMO a potentially revolutionary technology!

Some context: there is an entire neuroscientific field of study devoted to substituting one sensory modality with another: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution

The field was pioneered by Paul Bach-y-Rita (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bach-y-Rita) who most notably invented a setup that allowed blind people to "see" via a camera connected to a vibrating grid attached to their their backs, effectively substituting visual with haptic input.

In a nutshell, there is nothing intrinsically "visual" about neurons in the visual cortex, nor are neurons in the, e.g., auditory cortex exclusively tuned towards sound - the brain is plastic enough to "make sense" of a new type of input signal, which typically takes a couple of weeks.

My co-founder Peter König at EyeQuant.com - a neuroscience professor at the University of Osnabrueck - is working on similar projects with his feelspace group, where they created a compass-belt that vibrates whereever north is, taking sensory substitution a step further by effectively creating a new sensory modality of direction (Wired article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html)

As an excellent philosophical take on this I would recommend Alva Noe's "Action in Perception": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262140888/

I'm curious if for blind people the back stimulation system for seeing things would start to produce visuals in a way similar to normal sight. Similar to the possiblity that ultrasound used by bats might allow them to "see."

Also, I really want to get one of those compass-belts. It seems like an incredible experiencee. I wonder how it feels to not have it on though. Losing a sense mustn't be the nicest experience.

The part that I particularly thought was interesting is when he mentioned expanding it to Infrared and Ultraviolet :)

Yeah, the idea of "seeing" things normally invisible reminded me of Geordi La Forge's visor in Star Trek TNG.

This is some really cool tech. But while light frequencies can obviously be translated into other media we can perceive, "color" as such always comes attached with a ton of spacial information, so I wonder how well the eyeborg conveys that? It seems like this would feel like being extremely nearsighted, which is suggested when he mentions getting close to peoples' faces when doing portraits. I also wonder how much this is a constraint of the technology, and how much are the limits of our sense perception? For example, if the device were able to encode arbitrarily specific spacial information, could one train themselves to be able to instantly distinguish among 100s of unique, simultaneous sounds (like we do with sight), or would the experience always be din?

I have fully working eyes, but the concept of self-induced synesthesia is interesting. Especially for the purposes of getting extra-human senses. (Even if they're not that useful in practice.) Of course, if your eyes can already see color; glasses with a screen filter might be more efficient.

This one's come up on HN a couple of times before - sensing EM fields via a fingertip-embedded magnet: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?current...

More sensitive EM field detection could be vaguely useful, but to be useful it would probably require a bit of pre-processing (e.g. scaling the entire frequency range of the currently used EM spectrum into a range we can hear, see or feel) and maybe some protocol-specific hardware (decoding radio, video, wireless etc).

Other interesting candidates for extra-human senses beyond just increasing the range and sensitivity of existing senses would be EM/light polarization (insects can see polarization in the sky, so they can navigate by the sun's direction even when it's hidden by clouds) and magnetic field direction (which exists in bacteria, invertebrates, and birds, and may exist in some mammals.)

check out our institute's feelspace group, they've created a belt that induces a sense of direction: http://feelspace.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/ some more context in my comment above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602954

This does look really cool, however, surly his resolution is only 1 pixel?

He is limited to hearing one note at a time, therefore he can only perceive one color at a time?

Am I missing the point?

Your ears decode multiple frequency's at the same time so nothing limits things to a single color at a time.

But, this is for someone who literally could not perceive color at all but can still see. If he waves it around he can probably quickly tell that the wall is blue or white and then focus on extracting details from things he finds interesting.

Ok, really good points.

Taking onboard what you said, a system could work to match sound volume with direction to see in a higher resolution.

I.e. It would superimpose all color in range together with those closer to the center having a higher amplitude. So the colors directly ahead would be player louder and peripheral colors played quietly.

Or perhaps this is how it works already....

Roughly how many different notes could you hear at a time?

Is the color->note map arbitrary or is there some logic behind it? I imagine it greatly affects the associations (including emotions) he has built up over the years.

>Is the color->note map arbitrary or is there some logic behind it?

One way of doing this would be to map from the electromagnetic wavelength of the color to a corresponding audible frequency.

Audible range is something like 32 to 32768 Hrz. Assuming speed of sound in air of 343 m/s, this translates to wavelength range of 0.010437 to 10.6875 m . This can then be mapped onto the visible spectrum of 390 to 750 nm.

light_range = (750 * 10^-9) - (390 * 10^-9)

sound_range = 10.6875 - 0.010437

light_wavelength = (light_range * ((343 / sound_freq) - 0.010437) / sound_range) + (390 * 10^-9)

Potentially allowing him to view the world in inverted colors?

I would love to see a sample of his art pre- and post- prosthesis to see the evolution.

So ... can I make one/buy one?

Sure, grab an Arduino, a color sensor, and a speaker.

Here's something to get you started.

http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/sensors/Reports/DIYColorSensor

Wow that's really cool tech.

Not gonna like though, I thought this was going to be about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphex_Twin

If you want to get un-downvoted I think it would help your case if you provide us with more info than a wikipedia-page about dear Richard.

Aphex Twin does have synesthesia, so there is at least logic to thinking that a BBC article on the subject could be about him, though maybe not that it would be.

s/like/lie/

Definitely going to like. Inadvertently said the opposite of what I meant.

I hadn't considered artificial melding of the senses like this. Came out of left field, so the name of the first (only?) Brit I know of with synethesia popped into my head.

I thought this was going to be about...

Why?

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