I Listen to Color

I Listen to Color

I can never imagine the world without colors.  This man has lived his life for years in gray-scaled world.  His name is Neil Harbisson.  Neil was born completely colorblind.  Everything he saw in the past was black and white until he invented the “electronic eye”, which is a device that allows human to identify colors by different audible frequencies.  After watching Neil’s video from Ted.com, I was inspired by his positive attitude toward his life even with disability and amazed with his invention, the electronic eye. 

It is not easy for someone to overcome his or her disability.  However, Neil never lost his faith and hopefulness. Now, he can perceive 360 different colors with his electronic eye, it is equal to the capacity of what humans can identify.  The camera lens detects the object’s color and translates to human ears in sine waves of specific frequencies.  It must took Neil a lots of training and time to finally be able to identify all the different frequencies, because even for sound and mixing engineers, it is hard to tell the exact frequencies of the perceiving sounds.  He explained that when he sees colors of paintings or art works, he hears chords of music through all the different frequencies that he captures.  He can hear a symphony of colors. 
              I think the electronic eye is a huge innovation in the entertainment industry because of the fact that it allows color-blinded people to feel and sense the art works through musical aspects.  It also might be able to work for blind people.  In art galleries or museums, they may not see the figures of image, however they still can sense the colors through their ears.  His innovation in the entertainment industry can further develop the artistic fields of our lives through expressing colors to sounds and may be vice verse.  He created the world where colors and sounds interact together by giving unity sensation to the audience.