Accessible Arts / arts + disability NSW

A COLOUR-BLIND artist who could only recognise black and white shades has learnt how to paint with a full palette by “hearing” the hues he cannot see. Neil Harbisson, 25, has been fitted with a device called an Eyeborg, which converts 360 colours into different sounds. Now he is to mount his first London exhibition, showing city scenes such as red phone boxes in London and brightly coloured recycling banks in Barcelona. Harbisson, whose exhibition will arrive in London in April, after opening in Barcelona, said: “When I paint it is as if I am composing music on a canvas.”

As an art student at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, he painted only in black and white because that is all he saw. But three years ago he met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who came to give a lecture at the college. After the talk, Montandon was told of Harbisson’s condition and he took up the challenge of solving the problem, enabling Harbisson to paint in colour. The artist suffers from achromatopsia – or complete congenital colour blindness. Montandon decided to harness the way in which different colours reflect light at different frequencies, with light vibrating fastest from violet and slowest from red.

The first device fitted to Harbisson’s head was fairly primitive, letting him “hear” only six colours. His current model is far more sophisticated, giving him access to 360 colours. Montandon created the Eyeborg system, manufactured by HMC Interactive, the design company in Plymouth that he co-founded. It is a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours directly in front of it. The camera is connected to a laptop computer, carried in a backpack, which slows down the frequency of light waves to the frequency of sound waves. The computer then sends the “sound” of each colour to an earpiece worn by Harbisson. Montandon expects the system eventually to be as small as an MP3 player. The device has made a huge difference to Harbisson’s art, which is now his profession. Since wearing the Eyeborg he has expanded from just two or three, usually primary, colours to many more.

“I used to paint rather literally,” he said. “I would stand in front of something and just paint what I saw immediately before me. Now I’m doing more abstracts and being much more free and liberal with my art.”

His paint tubes have labels stating their colours and also have a sample of the colour itself on the outside so he knows through his ears which colour to pick. Harbisson is fortunate in that he has both an art background (his Spanish mother is an amateur artist) and a musical one. He has played the piano since he was a youngster, and this has helped him to assimilate the sounds. “It’s like the chords and scales of a piano and the different sounds they make,” he said. “So it’s as if I’m composing on the piano.”

He also wears the Eyeborg in everyday life. “I’ve got used to all the sounds,” he said. “It’s noisy but probably not much more noisy than a very busy city street.” The sounds do not degenerate into a cacophony because the tiny camera picks up only what is directly ahead of him. For that reason he does not drive: traffic and car lights would be too distant for him to be happy using the device.

Harbisson, who lives in Barcelona, has travelled extensively for his city pictures, visiting Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia as well as travelling around Britain. One work-in-progress involves representing each capital city in Europe as a square made up of two triangles of different colours. In Monaco, it was azure and salmon pink; in Bratislava it was yellow and turquoise; and in Andorra it was dark green and fuchsia.

He also tends to pick up and paint what he “sees” as the dominant colours of a place in his city-scapes. He said: “I wanted to go to cities because people used to tell me that cities were grey and drab. But they are not. They are very colourful.” Montandon hopes other people suffering from colour blindness or other vision disorders will now use his Eyeborg technology, whether or not they are artists.

How it works
1. Lens examines colour artist is looking at
2. Computer analyses colour and calculates an equivalent sound frequency
3. Earpiece emits a noise to tell artist which colour he is looking at
4. Artist has to learn which sounds identify particular colours

[Source: Article by Richard Brooks - Arts Editor, The Sunday Times, February 24 2008]