In the Sixties and Seventies, people who wanted to see fairies jump out from behind trees or experience sparkling showers of light as they walked through a mystical forest had fairly limited options: hallucinogens or a very active imagination.

These days it’s just a matter of shouting or clapping your hands, thanks to the work of Adam Montandon and his colleagues at HMCinteractive, a business that blends art, science and technology to create, well, all sorts of things.

The 25-year-old, who isn’t entirely sure of his job title (“That’s the hardest question you could ask,” he says. “I’m officially a company director but I do so much creative stuff that you could say something to do with that”), co-founded the company with two friends three years ago after winning a Submerge award for creating Hardcore Monkey Crash, an online game.

“Instead of winning prize money we won time with lawyers to set up the company, which is how it all started,” he says. “It was the best thing that ever happened to us, but at the same time it was such hard work that it was a complete nightmare. A couple of times I wished we’d just won an iPod or something.”

They’ve certainly taken an unorthodox approach to running the business: when it came to deciding how to allocate the 1 per cent of the company left over when each founder took a third, they didn’t use formulae or lawyers, but guns. Virtual guns, that is.

“We got a new video game that none of us had played and spent the day shooting each other,” he says. “The winner got the extra percentage. It wasn’t me.”

This splicing of practicality and imagination helped him to design and create a cyborg eye that allows an artist who can see only in shades of grey to hear in colour. “All colours are frequencies and so are all sounds. [The cyborg eye] converts violet into the low sound, red into the high sound and the others went in between. When the guy tried it on he couldn’t believe it because it meant that he could finally paint in colour by using the sounds of the sky and the sea and then choosing the same sound to put them on paper.”

His present project, developed in conjunction with speech therapists, also links sound and vision, by using noise to change what appears on a giant display. “It’s for children with speech and language difficulties. We use a high-powered mike and special technology so that as people make noise it’s translated on to a projector. It allows people with speech impairments to see what effect their voice has.” For example, children viewing a woodland scene can scare fairies out from behind the trees by shouting. “We want to make sure that there’s an element of magic to it,” he says. “We’re not interested in making a fortune. It’s about doing things that are interesting and stimulating.”

www.hmcinteractive.co.ukwww.futureofsound.org

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