Seeing with Sound

Tuesday June 3, 2008

Published in The Statesman 

It is described as seeing with sound.  For blind people, just a click of the tongue can help them figure out how wide a street is, whether there is a building on the other side of the street and where the best place to cross the street is by listening to echoes.

"What you learn to do is understand the difference in the sound that bounces off the environment.  For example, if I'm looking at a stonewall, the sound is going to bounce off that stone wall differently than if I was looking at a bush," explained Dan Kish, CEO for the USA based organization, World Access for the Blind.  

Kish along with his colleague Brian Bushway, have been in Kolkata for the last week in collaboration with Mercy Hospital teaching blind children how to use the science of echolocation.

"Many blind people throughout history have experienced echolocation and probably most of the students we're working with have experienced it at some level," Dan Kish said.  What World Access for the Blind has done is developed the first teaching curriculum for echolocation.

On Wednesday, approximately 20 students from Divine Fellowship Blind School in Joka were taught to click their tongues and listen.  After practicing inside Mercy Hospital, they went out to an open space and were told to find the nearest buliding by hearing the echoes.  At first a bit hesitant, the students clicked their way towards a buliding.

Then they were told to turn away from the building and compare the sound.  So what was the difference between the click facing the structure versus having the building behind them?

"When I face the building there is a hard sound.  When I turn around then there's a light sound," one of the students said.

Gradually the students moved from identifying buildigns to finding a parked car, using the click to figure out its size.

"I want you to hear this car," instructed Kish.  "This car sounds large, kind of like the building.  It sounds solid."  The students faced the car and clicked their tongues and then turned away from teh car to click.

"How can you tell it's a car?  A car has different heights to it.  The front of the car is usually lower than the middle of the car...you can tell something is a car because of its shape.  You can hear that the front of the car is lower than your shoulders.  The middle is higher than your shoulder," he explained.  They moved ont oa tree, to hear the difference between the tree and the car.

By the end of the week, the students will be brought to an unfamiliar environment and have to identify their surrounds on their own, giving them a skill to help them in life.  

Kish experienced echolocation at a young age.  When he was just a year old he had cancer of the retina and subsequently had to have both eyes removed and replaced with plastic ones.  But he said his parents raised him as if he could see, and exposed him to things they would introduce to any other child.  He taught himself to understand his environment throug hsound.  Kish calls himself a perceptual mobility specialist and has been assisting other blind people lear nto use echolocation for the last 15 years in different countries including Armenia, Holland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, Mexico, parts of western Europe as well as the USA.

Brian Bushway is one of the people who learned echolocation from Kish.  He had become visually impaired when he was 14, but even though he could not see, he noticed that he was still able to sense where things, ush as pillars, were in a room.

"At first it was just explained to me that your other sense could become heightened when you're blind.  But it was through World Access for the Blind that I learned it was science tha I could hear the sound... I was actually seeing with sound," Bushway said. 

For Bushway and Kish, teaching blind people how to use echolocation is only part of what they do.  Their passion is to help blind people to find freedom within their surroundings and for them to know that they can be succesful without seeing.

"I think it's more the idea that there are many ways to achieve.  Just because a blind person could not drive doesn't mean that they could not get to the same destination.  For me, it was learning to approach life differently but still achieve," Bushway said.