Conceptualizing "Screen Glare"

Now that I have developed tools that can transcribe my perception of light, I can use these tools to transform the experience of connecting with light into sound.

The medium that I've chosen for this transposition of meaning and aesthetic is the album. Screen Glare Is an 8-track album that sonifies everyday light-based experiences. The album's sequencing follows a sort of condensed "day in the life" storytelling, starting with one's awakening and ending at one's sleep. The lightscape of each of these "slices of life" is the guiding aesthetic references that informs the sound design, composition and arrangement of each track.

The eight tracks correspond to the following moments and their accompanying lightscapes.

Gaussian Lids: 

Waking up slowly and seeing the morning light filtered through your eyelids. Slowly things come into focus, and what were previously blobs of colour are now defined shapes.

Tile Shimmer: 

As you go through your morning routine, you bathe in the shimmer of light your bathroom tiles create.

Grids Diffuse:

Entering a train station and passing through grids of overhead lighting fixtures, you see their reflections on the floor.

Screen Scape:

Sitting in a subway surrounded by info-screens, you escape this information-dense reality by looking at your own screens.

Nodes That Flicker:

Exiting the subway and looking at an interactive transport map, you realize the connections between you and the rest of your city's transportation system. Connections ripple across the map every time a train stops at a station.

Stainless Steel And Coils:

Coming back home for dinner, you start cooking. The primary source of light is no longer the sun but the overhead lighting of your smoke hood and the red light from your ceramic cooktop.

Graded Frame:

You binge-watch some web series or a movie. Your monitor is the only light source in your room, and the walls quickly flicker between shades of blue and teal flashes. It's as if the colour-grader of the series painted your apartment.

The Last Screen:

As you go to sleep, you dive into the screen of your phone shining on your face. Your entire field of view focuses on this small luminous rectangle as your eyes become heavy.

These specific snippets of time and light are, of course, a result of my own reflections around the topic of light. I tried to go through a day and carefully examine the kinds of light environments I would place myself in. How did the light influence how I felt, and how did my feelings influence how I perceive light? Whilst the story I am transforming into sound is quite personal, my goal is to extend my particular experiences to a more broad set of experiences. I hope that the polysemic nature of the sound language I am developing helps bridge the gap between my experiences and the experiences of others.