From birth, Neil Harbisson lacked the ability to perceive color. Because of a rare condition called achromatopsia—total color-blindness—he always lived in a black-and-white world. But with the help of inventor Adam Montadon, Harbisson developed the “eyeborg,” a device that he wears on his head that translates colors into sound. The camera senses the color frequency in front of him, then sends different audible frequencies to a chip embedded in the back of his head.

Using the same color-sound language, he now also translates music into colors to create art—painting a multi-chromatic modernist representation of a Justin Bieber song, for instance. And as he explains in the film above, his ability to perceive color through sound has expanded into the realm of the superhuman; he can now “see” infrared rays, and soon, he hopes, ultraviolet as well.