Ever wanted to hear what the colour red really sounds like? Now you can.

Two Interactive Communication students at New York University have managed to put together a device that they hope will change the way people perceive sound. Natasha Dzurny and Louie Foo have developed Color Play, a new kind of turntable that instead of playing the traditional grooved vinyl discs with a needle plays hand-assembled colour wheels with a special colour sensor. The wheels are made up of different coloured wedges with the colour deciding the pitch of the sound and the width of the wedge deciding the length, allowing you to literally piece together short sequences from a simple selection of colours in varying sizes.

Dzurny and Foo’s end goal here was to create some kind of “voluntary synesthesia”, where a regular person would be able to mentally attach a pitch to a specific colour, ie. you could literally hear the colour purple, and it looks to us like they’re on the way to achieving that. From the video below you can see how the machine actually works, and fed through Ableton the possibilities not just for colour association but for music creation seem vast. [via The Vinyl Factory / Protein]