For Neil Harbisson, a self-described “cyborg” artist living near Barcelona, Spain, color is quite literally music to his ears thanks to an antenna he designed to overcome color blindness.
Well-known in Spain and with an international following that enabled him to meet the likes of Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Cruise, Harbisson is now testing out a new device designed to feel physically the passing of time.
Where once the term cyborg conjured up images of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, technology today is expanding human capacities through prostheses and implants.
Photo: AFP
Born in Northern Ireland with achromatopsia, a rare condition meaning he can only see in gray scale, Harbisson moved to Barcelona as a child, and grew up obsessed with color and things he could not sense.
It was an obsession that saw the now 39-year-old Briton eventually go under the surgeon’s knife to transform his identity and his life. While at music college in England, he developed the slim metal rod that arches over his head and vibrates according to colors it detects.
At first glance it looks like wearable technology, but it is as much a part of his body as his nose or his ears, giving him the ability to “hear” the color his eyes cannot see.
“Being a cyborg means technology is part of your identity,” Harbisson said. “It allows me to sense colors from infrared to ultraviolet through vibrations in my head that then become sound, so I can actually hear color.”
In 2004, he managed to persuade a surgeon — who remains anonymous — to drill it into his skull, the technology becoming part of his body as the bone grew around it.
The sensor picks up the frequency of colors and translates them into sounds that he perceives through bone conduction.
Humans normally hear using air conduction with sound waves passing through the outer and middle ears, and causing the inner eardrum to vibrate, but with bone conduction, the vibrations are transmitted through the skull or jawbone directly to the inner ear.
The color-sound association also means he senses colors when listening to music or even speeches, with every syllable having a frequency that relates to color.
“At the beginning, everything was chaotic because the antenna was not telling me blue, yellow, pink, it was giving me vibrations and I had no idea what color I had in front of me, but after some time, my brain got used to it and it slowly became part of my perception, and became normal,” Harbisson said.
Although it cannot be switched off, Harbisson’s antenna falls silent in darkness.
His “eureka moment” came after dreaming “in color” and realizing the colors “had been created by my brain and not by the chip.”
Although he might be the first person to “hear” color frequencies as notes, bone conduction helped Beethoven as he started going deaf. The German composer realized he could still hear by resting a wooden stick on the piano while biting the other end as he played. About 200 years later, bone-anchored hearing aids work in the same way via a metal implant inserted into the skull.
In the home where Harbisson grew up and where his mother still lives, a riot of colored canvases line the walls and the staircase is lined with curious-looking “facial scores” of celebrities like Di Caprio and Cruise.
These Hollywood stars let Harbisson detect the “sound” of their skin tone and lip color, which are rendered in enigmatic charcoal lines, but Harbisson is now turning his attention to a new project. He has created a device shaped like a chunky metal collar, designed to sense the passing of time, and is beginning a year-long trial to see how it works.
“There’s a point of heat that takes 24 hours to go around my neck and allows you to feel the rotation of the planet,” he said. “Once the brain gets used to it, you can use an app to make subtle changes to the speed of the point of heat which should alter your perception of time. You could potentially stretch time or make it feel like time is going faster.”
For now, it is a permanent wearable rather than an implant. A previous incarnation had to be scrapped because he was “getting burnt” at 6pm.
“This is an art that does carry some kind of risk, but it’s an unknown risk because we don’t have much history of bodies and technology being merged,” he said.
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