2022 / Interactive Media | 4488x6216px
Symphonic Companion
Symphonic Companion asks a simple question with a complicated answer: what happens to a painting when you change its music? Rembrandt's The Music Party at the Rijksmuseum, encountered during a student product-design project, became the frame: figures in a room, sound implied but never fixed.
I designed and built the piece as a real-time system using expression-driven After Effects output, Lottie-style delivery, and JavaScript audio analysis. Visitors enable a microphone; the figures respond across channels to timbre and rhythm. The technology stays legible at large scale. The interaction reads as a way of looking, not a separate interface bolted onto an artwork.
The idea had lived in sketchbooks for years: theatre-trained thinking about how listening might become seeing. Symphonic Companion was the moment the stack caught up, proof that a responsive image could hold the same curiosity as a static one.
Paralaks showed the work at Gazhane İstanbul. It sits between media art and open-ended inquiry: less a finished answer than an invitation to watch how sound reshapes what you think you're looking at.
“Symphonic Companion” is an interactive piece to explore new ways of seeing as you change its music. Do we expect any sound in the painting? Is music an act of seeing? I see Music as a guide and muse, who opens our minds to creativity, invention, and possibility. It’s just one way to look at it. The subject of Rembrandt’s painting Musical Company may seem like a mystery. However, the subject may change according to our act of seeing.
I built the piece as a small real-time system rather than a fixed animation: interaction changes the audiovisual state, and the viewer’s input becomes part of how the image is read. The main challenge was to keep that response legible at the scale of the work, so the technology felt like a way of looking rather than a separate interface.
