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Well, I was born with a rare visual condition

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called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness,

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so I've never seen color,

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and I don't know what color looks like,

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because I come from a grayscale world.

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To me, the sky is always gray,

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flowers are always gray,

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and television is still in black and white.

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But, since the age of 21,

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instead of seeing color, I can hear color.

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In 2003, I started a project

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with computer scientist Adam Montandon,

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and the result, with further collaborations

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with Peter Kese from Slovenia

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and Matias Lizana from Barcelona,

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is this electronic eye.

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It's a color sensor that detects

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the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) —

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and sends this frequency to a chip installed

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at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me

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through the bone, through bone conduction.

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(Frequency sounds) So, for example, if I have, like —

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This is the sound of purple. (Frequency sounds)

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For example, this is the sound of grass. (Frequency sounds)

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This is red, like TED. (Frequency sounds)

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This is the sound of a dirty sock. (Laughter)

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Which is like yellow, this one.

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So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years,

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since 2004, so I find it completely normal now

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to hear color all the time.

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At the start, though, I had to memorize the names you give

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for each color, so I had to memorize the notes,

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but after some time, all this information

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became a perception.

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I didn't have to think about the notes.

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And after some time, this perception became a feeling.

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I started to have favorite colors,

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and I started to dream in colors.

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So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt

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that the software and my brain had united,

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because in my dreams, it was my brain creating

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electronic sounds. It wasn't the software,

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so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg.

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It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device

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was no longer a device.

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It had become a part of my body,

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an extension of my senses,

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and after some time, it even became a part

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of my official image.

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This is my passport from 2004.

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You're not allowed to appear on U.K. passports

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with electronic equipment, but I insisted

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to the passport office that what they were seeing

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was actually a new part of my body,

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an extension of my brain, and they finally accepted me

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to appear with the passport photo.

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So, life has changed dramatically since I hear color,

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because color is almost everywhere,

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so the biggest change for example is

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going to an art gallery, I can listen to a Picasso,

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for example. So it's like I'm going to a concert hall,

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because I can listen to the paintings.

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And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking,

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it's very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket.

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It's like going to a nightclub.

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It's full of different melodies. (Laughter) Yeah.

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Especially the aisle with cleaning products.

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It's just fabulous. (Laughter)

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Also, the way I dress has changed.

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Before, I used to dress in a way that it looked good.

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Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. (Laughter)

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(Applause)

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So today I'm dressed in C major,

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so it's quite a happy chord. (Laughter)

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If I had to go to a funeral, though,

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I would dress in B minor, which would be

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turquoise, purple and orange. (Laughter)

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Also, food, the way I look at food has changed,

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because now I can display the food on a plate,

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so I can eat my favorite song. (Laughter)

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So depending on how I display it,

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I can hear and I can compose music with food.

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So imagine a restaurant where we can have, like,

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Lady Gaga salads as starters. (Laughter) I mean,

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this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably.

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And also, some Rachmaninov piano concertos

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as main dishes, and some Bjork or Madonna desserts,

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that would be a very exciting restaurant

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where you can actually eat songs.

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Also, the way I perceive beauty has changed,

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because when I look at someone, I hear their face,

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so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible.

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(Laughter) And it might happen the opposite,

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the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like,

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sound portraits of people.

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Instead of drawing someone's face, like drawing the shape,

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I point at them with the eye and I write down

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the different notes I hear, and then I create sound portraits.

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Here's some faces.

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(Musical chords)

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Yeah, Nicole Kidman sounds good. (Laughter)

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Some people, I would never relate, but they sound similar.

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Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman.

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They have similar sound of eyes.

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So you relate people that you wouldn't relate,

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and you can actually also create concerts

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by looking at the audience faces.

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So I connect the eye, and then I play the audience's faces.

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The good thing about this is,

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if the concert doesn't sound good, it's their fault.

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It's not my fault, because — (Laughter)

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And so another thing that happens is that

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I started having this secondary effect

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that normal sounds started to become color.

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I heard a telephone tone, and it felt green

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because it sounded just like the color green.

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The BBC beeps, they sound turquoise,

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and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience,

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so I started to paint music and paint people's voices,

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because people's voices have frequencies

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that I relate to color.

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And here's some music translated into color.

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For example, Mozart, "Queen of the Night," looks like this.

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(Music) Very yellow and very colorful,

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because there's many different frequencies.

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(Music)

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And this is a completely different song.

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(Music) It's Justin Bieber's "Baby." (Laughter)

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(Music)

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It is very pink and very yellow.

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So, also voices, I can transform speeches into color,

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for example, these are two very well-known speeches.

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One of them is Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream,"

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and the other one is Hitler.

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And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls

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without labels, and then I ask people,

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"Which one do you prefer?"

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And most people change their preference

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when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler

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and the one on the right is Martin Luther King.

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So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors,

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just like human vision.

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I was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel.

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But then, I just thought that

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this human vision wasn't good enough.

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There's many, many more colors around us

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that we cannot perceive,

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but that electronic eyes can perceive.

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So I decided to continue extending my color senses,

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and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet

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to the color-to-sound scale, so now I can hear colors

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that the human eye cannot perceive.

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For example, perceiving infrared is good because you can

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actually detect if there's movement detectors in a room.

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I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control.

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And the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that

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you can hear if it's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe,

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because ultraviolet is a dangerous color,

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a color that can actually kill us, so I think we should all have this wish

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to perceive things that we cannot perceive.

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That's why, two years ago,

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I created the Cyborg Foundation,

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which is a foundation that tries to help people

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become a cyborg, tries to encourage people

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to extend their senses

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by using technology as part of the body.

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We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses,

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so if we extend our senses,

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we will consequently extend our knowledge.

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I think life will be much more exciting

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when we stop creating applications for mobile phones

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and we start creating applications for our own body.

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I think this will be a big, big change

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that we will see during this century.

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So I do encourage you all to think about which senses

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you'd like to extend.

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I would encourage you to become a cyborg.

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You won't be alone. Thank you. (Applause)

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(Applause)