“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.