{"id":148,"date":"2016-07-12T07:12:16","date_gmt":"2016-07-12T07:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=148"},"modified":"2026-07-17T13:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T13:27:09","slug":"holi-india-ireland-belfast-cyborg-neil-harbisson-colour-blind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=148","title":{"rendered":"“When I\u2019m Happy, I Dress in C Major”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T<\/span>he funeral home is a sea of black, the colour of mourning. The man in the casket had many friends, who quietly queue up to pay respects. Then, artist Neil Harbisson enters the room and all eyes are immediately on him. It\u2019s difficult to steal a dead man\u2019s thunder, but when Harbisson walks in, it is impossible to look away. It could have been the 33-year-old\u2019s ensemble; he had chosen an orange, purple, and turquoise suit for the occasion. Or it could\u2019ve been the antenna protruding from his skull, partially concealed by his bowl cut.<\/p>\n\n

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Harbisson had chosen the unconventional outfit to express his sadness. Born colour-blind in Belfast, Ireland, the artist has spent 11 years with an antenna that transforms colour into sound, embedded into his skull.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cI dress in a way that sounds good. If I\u2019m happy, I dress in C major. If I\u2019m sad, I dress in a minor chord. So, for the funeral, I chose a B minor, which incidentally is this bright trio,\u201d he says, pointing at his suit.<\/p>\n\n

The funeral registers as a low hum to Harbisson \u2013 no high-pitched aubergines or clashing notes of red here. Instead, the many shades of black create an ominous buzz with clashing chords. Later, to cure the blues, he goes to the supermarket. Not too many people go for walks in the supermarket for fun, but Harbisson does. His favourite section is the cleaning product aisle. \u201cThe rows of rainbow-coloured bottles sound like a symphony,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n

Harbisson, who is officially the world\u2019s first cyborg, spent the first two decades of his life in greyscale.\u00a0Back then,\u00a0he\u00a0had no words to describe his condition, but artists like Stelarc were taking the world by storm through experiments with the human body and\u00a0synaesthesia<\/a>, a condition where\u00a0two or more of the five senses work\u00a0together, enabling people to hear colour, or taste sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harbisson, who is officially the world\u2019s first cyborg, spent the first two decades of his life in greyscale.<\/p>\n

Courtesy: Neil Harbisson <\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\n\n

Today, the Barcelona-based artist understands that synaesthesia does not define his condition accurately because the \u201ceyeborg\u201d (as he fondly calls the antenna sticking out of his head) acts as an extra sense that only relates colour to sound, objectively and equally to everyone.<\/p>\n\n

As a result of this \u201ceyeborg\u201d, he is obsessed with colour. \u201cWhen I was a child, I tried lots of ways to understand colours; I related them to people. When someone talked about blue, I thought about a friend of mine who was brainy. Pink was a feminine, hippie kind of girl; yellow was a boy from London, very childlike and eccentric,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cI wore only black and white clothes,\u201d he adds. \u201cMy classmates would often laugh at my mismatched socks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

So, sartorial displays were out of the question, and a rainbow flag meant nothing to him, neither did a red rose. It was an encounter with Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert at his alma mater, Dartington College of Arts in Devon, that gave him a shot at a colourful life.<\/p>\n\n