Icsc 2006

Sensory-substitution prosthetic systems are based on the idea of substituting visual stimulation with stimulation from another intact sense such as audition or touch. Although such systems have been studied for almost 40 years (Bach-y-Rita 1968), they are still poorly understood. Here we ask whether we learn to perceive simple spatial properties using The vOICe (Meijer 1992), a system for visual-auditory substitution. The vOICe converts images to sounds according to a straightforward rule: images are scanned from left to righ, horizontal positions are converted to temporal position within 1s sound. Vertical pixel position is converted to frequency (lower frequencies meaning lower positions). Pixel intensity is converted to loudness. Thus each scan generates a complex sound signal having a regular mapping of sound features to image features.