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.
The man who hears colour
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Re: The man who hears colour
#12So ... can I make one/buy one?
Re: The man who hears colour
#13Is 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.
Potentially allowing him to view the world in inverted colors?
Re: The man who hears colour
#14I 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…
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.
Re: The man who hears colour
#15Wow 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.
Re: The man who hears colour
#16Some 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/
Re: The man who hears colour
#17I 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.
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
Re: The man who hears colour
#18Is 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)
Re: The man who hears colour
#19I 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.)
Re: The man who hears colour
#20This 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?