Science News

Two researchers have provide preliminary evidence that listening to Mozart can help us cope with cognitive dissonance—that intense feeling of discomfort that arises when we realize two of our core beliefs are at odds.

Neil Harbisson can only see shades of grey. So his prosthetic eyepiece, which he calls an “eyeborg”, interprets the colours for him and translates them into sound. Harbisson’s art sounds like a kind of inverse synaesthesia. But where synaesthetes experience numbers or letters as colours or even “taste” words, for example, Harbisson’s art is down to a precise transposition of colour into sound frequencies. As a result, he is able to create facial portraits purely out of sound, and he can tell you that the colour of Mozart’s music is mostly yellow. Liz Else caught up with him at the TEDGlobal conference.