© Pranav Lal, Headless Shadow on Swimming Pool

When I listen to my soundscape of the pool it is a soft low density texture. and from these sounds I can see what is happening to the water. It is a semi-permanent floating shape which caught my attention and that is why I took the photograph. The reflection is forming structure without density. A full-sighted person may be attracted to the play of light on the water, whereas I am interested in the density of the shadows on the water revealed by the sound and in my mind, I can touch it. This was taken in 2016 when I was shepherding a bunch of blind and sighted German tourists on holiday in a resort town in the Indian state of Rajasthan. We had come back from a camel cart ride, and we were walking past the pool.

I am a tinkerer, writer and photographer who uses a visual prosthesis to perceive the world because I am blind. I do not have any shape and color vision. I can only perceive light.

I use a program called the vOICe built by Dr Peter B.L. Meijer that converts images to sound. This allows me to perceive any kind of image because there are mathematically defined uniform rules for the image mapping to sound.

These rules are as follows:

• The horizontal placement of objects is represented by panning.
• The height is represented by pitch, the higher the object, the higher the pitch.
• The brightness is represented by volume such that the louder the sound, the brighter the object.

The vOICe is based on the principal of sensory substitution where information from one sense is rendered via another sense.

Audio recordings by Pranav’s cousin, Abhishek Narain.

© Pranav Lal, Seaside at Panjim, Goa

Pinhole camera photography is not my usual process of photographing. Around 2008 in Goa, I attended a photography workshop, and we made pinhole cameras out of matchboxes. All I wanted to see was how the sun fell into the sea. I had read about sunsets in novels, and I wished to observe the rate of change when darkness is about to fall. The amount of detail and the texture changes so that as the sun drops it becomes ethereal. It is a strange kind of disappearing. The people in this scene are incidental to me. I was after the two spots of light and the play on the water. The sun had already gone leaving the bright lights in its place.

© Pranav Lal, A waterfall with rainbow

This is probably the Gullfoss Waterfall in Iceland in 2011. Soundscapes allow me to perceive the waterfall as a whole and admire it like any other tourist.  I wanted to get a sense of the scale of the waterfall with the rainbow and that is why I included the two people in my photograph. It is only through images encoded to sound that I can perceive a rainbow, as I have never had a rainbow described to me and I do not have colour vision to see it. I could feel the spray of the water and I was also attracted to the form of the surrounding volcanic rocks on the left of the waterfall. I am interested in the interplay of water, light and the shapes of the rock.