Software Transfors Color to Sound

Researchers of the Cornell University http://www.cornell.edu/ created software that transforms color in to sound and presents a detailed color-scaled image to someone who is blind. With the software, detailed weather maps are now transformed into accessible musical images.

“Color is something that does not exist in the world of a blind person,” said Cornell department of electrical and computer engineering graduate student Victor Wong in a NewsFactor article. Wong lost his sight in a traffic accident at age seven and now does doctoral work that inspired him to invent image-to-sound software. “I could see before, so I know what it is. But there is no way that I can think of to give an exact idea of color to someone who has never seen before.”

“There is no question that color is one important thing communicated visually, which blind people would benefit from having,” said Gary Wunder, a University of Missouri (MU) computer programmer and president of the Missouri chapter of the National Federation of the Blind. “This is true not only for weather maps, but also for something as simple as looking at a color-coded timeline.”

Cornell undergraduate engineering student Ankur Moitra wrote a Java computer code that could translate images into sound, and later, convert pixels of various colors into piano notes of various tones.

Source: NewsFactor