Fwd: [Blindtlk] A Rainbow Of Sound

From: David Andrews (dandrews@visi.com)
Date: Thu Mar 10 2005 - 14:21:38 PST


>
>New Software May Offer a Rainbow of Sound.
>March 4, 2005.
>NewsFactor Network
>CAPTION: "We started with the basic research question of how to represent a
>detailed color-scaled image to someone who is blind," says research
>associate James Ferwerda from the Cornell program in computer graphics. "The
>most natural approach was to try sound."
>Blue Morning, Blue Day. Yellow Submarine. Brown-eyed Girl. Purple People
>Eater.
>>From the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Pink and Pink Floyd, music can certainly
>be colorful.
>But can color be musical?
>Yes -- with the right software, say Cornell University researchers who hope
>a rainbow of melodies will bring the color of life to the visually impaired.
>"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, who lost his sight in a traffic accident at age seven.
>"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."
>Color with a Capital See
>Necessity is supposed to be the mother of invention, and Wong's doctoral
>work -- which required that he read color-scaled weather maps of the Earth's
>upper atmosphere -- was the necessity that inspired him to invent
>image-to-sound software.
>"Color is an extra dimension," in the weather maps, Wong explained. Subtle
>color changes represent minute weather fluctuations.
>"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."
>At first, Wong's graduate advisor Mike Kelley verbally described the maps.
>They also tried printing the maps in Braille.
>When neither approach worked, they turned to sound.
>"We started with the basic research question of how to represent a detailed
>color-scaled image to someone who is blind," said research associate James
>Ferwerda from the Cornell program in computer graphics. "The most natural
>approach was to try sound, since color and pitch can be directly related,
>and sensitivity to changes in pitch is quite good."
>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.
>Polly Wants a Color
>With the new software loaded, Wong guided a stylus on a computerized tablet
>with a color photograph of a parrot. With each change in color and tone,
>piano notes sang color resolution in 88 gradations, ranging from blue for
>the lowest notes to red for the highest.
>The software also has an image-to-speech feature that reads aloud the
>numerical values of the map's coordinates and values associated with a color
>at any given point on the image.
>"In principle, I could turn off the music and just have the software read
>out the value of each point," Wong told NewsFactor.
>To Sea or Not To See
>Boundary recognition -- the so-called "land-and-sea" problem -- posed
>another challenge.
>"Sometimes I just want to know where is the land and where is the sea," said
>Wong.
>A simple way to delineate boundaries -- coloring the right half of an image
>blue and the left half red -- becomes complicated because Wong has to move
>the stylus back and forth continuously from one color to the next.
>Trying to home in on the boundary by this trial and error method is
>time-consuming and error-prone, so Wong, Moitra and Ferwerda are working to
>develop software that can effectively pick out the important boundaries in
>an image.
>"Tackling complex color images is only one problem out of many that blind
>scientists are facing," Wong explained.
>Blind scientists and the visually impaired, generally, MU's Wunder noted.
>"Inexpensive color recognition could also be helpful in matching clothing
>and helping blind people work on circuitry where color coding is important,"
>he told NewsFactor.
>
>
>http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=New-Software-May-Offer-a-R
>ainbow-of-Sound&story_id=30455
>
>
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