[Artbeyondsightmuseums] Music from Color, Lottolab

[fnugg at online.no]

**Hi,
**

**Beau Lotto on Tedtalks, and Lottolab site.
**

**Optical illusions
**

**Regards,
**

**Lisa
**

**excerpt from interview
How does Bing Bong fit in with your wider research?**

Bing Bong is part of a larger program of research, which is sensory 
substitution or sensory augmentation.

When I say to people that the light that falls onto our eyes is 
meaningless, people find that really hard to believe. You open your 
eyes, you look around, you see nothing /but/ meaning; you ask yourself, 
How could it be meaningless? But that's of course because you're not 
seeing the light that falls onto your eye, but your brain's perception 
of that light. You're seeing that light in the context of the millions 
of years of evolution that our brains have gone through.

But if I translate that light into sound, and you instead /hear/ the 
visual information, you directly experience the meaninglessness of it.

Then, through interacting with the world through sensory substitution, 
you experience yourself literally making sense of it. You begin to hear 
patterns. Those patterns start having a meaning for you. You're actually 
an observer of yourself as you do this.

Through sensory substitution, we can create prosthetics for the visually 
impaired --- to make the world navigable. But we can also do things like 
make music from color, which is an element that I touched on during my 
TEDTalk 
<http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html>.

*The brain almost doesn't seem to care what type of information it 
receives --- it just starts decoding any information it is given. Do I 
have that right?*

The most fundamental thing the brain does is it evolves to evolve. It 
adapts to adapt. The brain is wonderfully plastic. Now, it's a plastic 
of different levels of flexibility --- the brain couldn't function 
without some stability as well.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/10/08/beau_q_and_a/

Bing Bong Iphone application
http://www.lottolab.org/products.asp

Tedtalks
http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html


Music from Color
http://www.lottolab.org/articles/musicfromcolour.asp

Lottolab

http://www.lottolab.org/index.asp