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.
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