Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]>

dian and all,
there should be no misunderstanding of the purpose of the
software written for the scientist at Cornell.

The purpose was definitely NOT to allow a blind person to hear
colors!

In fact, the purpose was, and a legitimate one, to allow him to
hear differences in air density shown on one form of weather map.

the fact that sighted scientists have chosen to use colors to
represent these differences in air density is in no way related
to the use of sound to represent the same density information.

The implication that this kind of technique could be used to
allow blind folks to hear pictures has no basis in logic or
scientific research at all.

there is no consistant relationship between sound and color..
Period!

Scientists often choose to use various visual techniques to
represent factors which are not otherwise perceivable by unaided
human senses.  These representations need to be learned by the
scientists using them just like any other artificial code we invent.

You can represent density variations with anything you want,it
happens that since the human ear can hear a wide range of sounds,
and percieve very small variations in pitch to tell how the
represented density changes over the chart, sound is a good
choice here.

But, again, it has nothing what ever to do with hearing colors.

Despite the desperate repeated experiments of some famous and
some infamous researchers over the years, nobody has come up with
any good science to indicate that any correlation between sound
and vision means anything at all.

Same with vision and touch. whether its on your finger or your
tongue.

so, and Dian, I'm sorry to be a bit harsh, we need to keep clear
the legitimate scientific purpose of the software discribed in
the refferenced article and not confuse it with hearing pictures
which it most absolutely isn't.

You could develope a device which would represent colors as
tones, but even if the user had previous experience with color,
he would not be able to derive meaning from this representation
because we have no consistant linkage between colors and sounds
in our brains.

Even if you started out a blind baby with such a device, it is
not at all clear that he would learn to percieve the world in any
way like seeing.  And you'd have deprived him of natural hearing
by cluttering up his hearing with a meaningless code.

tom Fowle
Rehabilitation Engineer
SmithKettlewell Eye Research Institute RERC


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