Nobody remembers Van Gogh as a musician. You remember him for his cosmic explosions, bittersweet sunflowers, lonely bedroom and one ear.

He did however play the piano for a short period and was never any good. His lack of dexterity is not the focus of this story though. Rather the mindset with which he approached this monochromatic instrument.

Van Gogh was first and foremost a colorist and his emotions were expressed solely through his use of vibrant reds, ochre, cobalt and burnt sienna. Showing him a keyboard of black and white was like rendering him blind and tone deaf.

He struggled for weeks on end to overcome this color-blockage but the result was only broken and dissonant sounds far removed from the harmony of his canvases.

Then, one afternoon the piano just made sense…

This understanding did not stem from a universal handed-down perception of learning but from an idiosyncratic Van Gogh-ish logic. Seeing that the color of the keys seemed to be the problem he decided to give each key a new color of it’s own. He used dark blues to represent the lower tones and stretched these colors through the purples, blues, greens and yellows to the highest notes, which were hues of red.

The notes made sense and now for the first time he could read them according to his own personal rule of logic.

At this stage, stop reading and observe the environment in which you are sitting. Observe all the colors around you. The paint on the wall, your nail polish, the magazine lying on the corner of your desk. Acknowledge the sunlight streaming in through the window or maybe the clouds chasing through the sky and how the fluctuation in light intensity is constantly changing every single color in the room. Notice how many new colors a friend brings in with her as she stops by your desk.

Thinking back to Van Gogh and his logic: if every note is represented by a color the opposite is also true and the colors of the room are all ‘sounding’ together and constantly playing a different melody as the hues and the colors themselves change.

For you the dynamic between sound and the visual has shifted and new meaning and possibilities are presenting themselves while experiencing this new consciousness.

There are various reasons why I find this story inspiring. Firstly, this condition exists today and is called synaesthesia. Individuals are born with the ability to experience an intermingling of two senses within the same instance. People can smell colors, taste sound, hear pictures or any combination of the five senses.

Scientists are using synaesthesia and taking the concept even further. A group of scientist at the University of Dusseldorf has been developing a system whereby blind people can learn to ‘see’ using a system that converts images into sound. They use the pitch, volume and note placement to represent the left, right, top, bottom and brightness of an image. Starting out the group could only identify geometric shapes. By the end of the week, one girl drew the image of a pot plant identical to the image that was used by only listening to it.

The second and most inspiring part of this story is the way in which boundaries are crossed and disciplines intermingled. It is in re-evaluating the boundaries surrounding the perception of the normal and the everyday that new and refreshing solutions emerge.

It is with this mindset that Play Pumps International erected their first merry-go-round at the Motshegofadiwa Primary School in a town called Stinkwater, 15km from Pretoria. The town is aptly named for the smell of its water and the erratic supply. With every rotation of the merry-go-round, water is pumped out of a well into a tank high above on the playground, supplying enough water for everyone.

Plenty of people are working on tools for change but their fields remain unconnected. Merging the minds of science with that of art, technology, sociology any many more can create a template of expansiveness, of possibility and of feeling more alive.