Listening to Paintings

This project combines sound art and the humanities to build an interface for “listening to” paintings with your ears. It translates a painting's pictorial quality and its blank spaces — not through visual or verbal explanation, but into the form of sound. By creating an environment that lets anyone step into the space of a work and intuitively “feel” it, the project offers a new viewing experience in which the viewer encounters a world of sound, giving rise to the “continuation” of a painting's story. 1: An experience of viewing painting through sound Translating a painting into sound. The project explores whether a painting's pictorial quality and its blank spaces can be translated into a form other than sight or language, and whether a viewer can “feel” it intuitively. 2: An interface that creates a new kind of place The project explores the possibilities of communication between viewer and work, or viewer and space, through sound and physical interaction. 3: Media and emotion The project explores what kind of feeling or emotion people can direct toward “sound” as it becomes digitized.