Screen recording of The vOICe: Can you visualize the soundscapes before their source image appears?

Important: use stereo headphones! This sensory substitution training video is aimed at normally sighted (but perhaps also low vision) people, who have eyesight to compare their experience and interpretation of soundscapes with. The video lets sighted people explore how vision-like seeing-with-sound can become through prolonged practice. Let’s beat retinal implants and brain implants for restoring vision to the blind! Yes, we can! The vOICe sensory substitution here sounds one filled rectangle and one line segment, with the visual view first appearing after 3 soundscapes. Can you visualize the soundscapes before their source image appears? Challenging, right? Your suggested training scheme: practice soundscape visualization for 10 minutes a day for a year, and report your findings privately or publicly on social media. We need you! And yes, it may take on the order of a year before the experience of seeing with sound becomes truly visual, so it is not for the faint of heart. Background information: The vOICe scans every image from left to right in a second, while associating elevation with pitch (tone frequency) and brightness with loudness. Thus it can sound any image while preserving a significant amount of pictorial information in sound. Use good quality stereo headphones, because the left-to-right scanning is perceptually supported by stereo panning. This sound visualization training video for The vOICe sensory substitution sounds one randomly placed filled rectangle and one line segment per frame; each soundscape is repeated 4 times, and the visual display is blanked until the last soundscape in each sequence. Your challenge is therefore to learn and visualize the soundscapes through mental imagery ahead of the visual appearance of their source image. Each time when the visual display appears you know how close your imagination was to the source image of the soundscapes. You will quickly notice that you can already with most soundscapes hear all the visual detail needed for decent pictorial low vision, but still lack the fluency to mentally put it all together within a few seconds, and also lack the experience of “true“ sight matching the available level of visual detail. If and once the visual experience matches the audible content, there will be true low vision without eyesight! Imagine what this technology can mean for millions of blind people. Staying concentrated is hard though, so more than 10 minutes of daily practice may not add much value. You brain will keep adapting in between your daily brief sessions - it just takes time, your patience and stamina. A cup of strong coffee ahead of practice before you get up in the morning may help. The video was generated by The vOICe for Windows 2.x from (), with its exercise mode toggled by function key F11 and with exercise preferences set via the menu Edit | Exercise Preferences | Randomly Placed Shapes. Display blanking mode 2 gives the visual display with the source image at the end of each soundscape sequence. In this video the background intensity was set to black (0) instead of dark gray (level 1), at the expense of a slight loss of stereo panning reference sound. Full-screen viewing is toggled by function key F12. You can launch The vOICe for Windows directly into this Exercise mode by entering the following command on a DOS command line in the folder with the executable : “ -F11F12 -nocapture“ (without the quotes). Now you can watch this YouTube video with any browser on your PC or mobile device, but for the most immersive experience with the least amount of visual distraction from eyesight you can also stream The vOICe for Windows output live to your Oculus/Meta Quest headset using Virtual Desktop (we are not affiliated with them). Virtual Desktop lets you practice your voluntary mental imagery for instance late at night or (preferably) early in the morning while lying comfortably in bed, using its Black Void environment for zero distraction from peripheral vision and its Head Lock option to keep The vOICe exercise view centered at all times. Ultimate goal: eidetic visual imagery from visual-to-auditory sensory substitution, to provide a form of vision to totally blind people; for late-blind people we aim to go beyond functional vision by having the soundscapes perceived as true (albeit low) vision, with sensations of light and everything. No retinal implant, no brain implant, no surgery: vastly cheaper with far less visual distortion, higher acuity, larger field of view, and replaceable hardware (i.e. no insurmountable device lifetime issues).