Sonic Lens
Reboot Your Ears
A human-centered listening project that turns what you see into a living soundtrack.
Architecture becomes music.
Chaos revoiced into balance.
Built during CODAME ART+TECH / Exploring The New Human 2036
Reboot Your Ears
A human-centered listening project that turns what you see into a living soundtrack.
Architecture becomes music.
Chaos revoiced into balance.
Built during CODAME ART+TECH / Exploring The New Human 2036
Bringing Sonic Lens into physical architecture and public squares.
Sonic Lens is designed as more than a personal tool; it is a spatial listening experience that transforms architecture into collective soundscapes, from silent museum corridors to the vibrant intensity of public squares, exploring how sound can revoice the structures we inhabit for the CODAME Creative Hackathon. Installation rendering and visualisation by Bart Cuppens.
Bells warned us. Bells gathered us. Bells marked time.
Sound was humanity's first public interface.
Sonic Lens begins there.
What if sound could again become a lens through which humans experience the world?
Sonic Lens turns what you see into a living soundtrack. It helps people navigate, calm down, stay safe, stay in rhythm, and feel wonder.
It does not replace reality. It revoices reality.
The world stays the same. What changes is how it reaches you.
Two different worlds. The same question.
I'm an inventor, technologist, and projection mapping artist. I've spent two decades building products and systems, but what drives me is the intersection of code and culture, focusing on algorithmic art, generative visuals, light and sound.
The spark came while watching a sunset in Gokarna, India. The sky was so beautiful it felt like it deserved its own soundtrack. Why can't the world play music to me as I watch it?
That simple question became an obsession. What if a camera could read any physical space and turn it into a living, generative composition?
Silvie Claes brings an architectural and human-experience lens to the Sonic Lens project. For over 20 years, she has designed spaces and studied how people move through them, which taught her to think deeply about structure, flow, rhythm, and atmosphere. That background shaped the way she sees environments — not just as places we pass through, but as experiences that affect how we feel.
Living and working in India changed that awareness in a more personal way. Cities here can feel intense, layered, loud, and visually overwhelming, and she found herself asking whether there might be a better way to move through that intensity without feeling drained by it. Instead of escaping the world, could sound help people stay more connected to it — while feeling calmer, clearer, and more grounded inside it?
Silvie Claes kept returning to one simple thought: before screens, sound guided us. Bells warned us, gathered us, and marked time. Through the Sonic Lens project, she explores what it could mean to bring that kind of guidance back in a personal and contemporary way — so that what we see is not only observed, but also felt, navigated, and experienced differently through sound.
We came from different directions (architecture and technology, structure and signal) and arrived at the same place. The world is full of beauty and intensity that goes unheard. Sonic Lens is our answer: translate what you see into what you hear. Not to escape reality, but to experience it differently.
Your camera reads the scene around you: its structure, flow, movement, and pace. Light, edges, rhythm, openness. The raw visual signal of where you are.
Those visual signals become sound. Not random noise, but layered music that reflects the character of your environment: its texture, memory, and cultural tone.
The soundtrack adapts to support you. It can sharpen your focus, soften the chaos, signal safety cues, or simply help you find calm in the middle of intensity.
See it in action: the working prototype turns video into generative music in real time.
Try the PrototypeThese are not features. They are listening modes.
Historical memory made audible. A building's age, a street's past, a neighbourhood's story, translated into layers of sound.
Stress and urgency brought closer. Crowd density, traffic pressure, visual chaos: surfaced as sonic awareness so you can respond before you react.
Chaos softened into balance. The louder and busier the scene, the gentler the sound becomes as a counterweight for overstimulating environments.
Architecture becomes music. Columns become bass, arches become melody, light becomes harmony. Every structure has a sound waiting inside it.
The world tuned to your state. Walking fast? The music keeps up. Slowing down? It softens with you. Your rhythm shapes the listening.
One place, many cultural sound worlds. The same square in Rome can sound Baroque, medieval, or modern, depending on which layer of memory you choose.
Gentle cues could make every walk feel steadier and less overwhelming.Leela, 68, elderly walker, Bangalore
The environment becomes part of the rhythm, not a distraction from it.Aarav, 34, runner, Belgium
A reset before the game could begin with one familiar sonic pathway.Mira, 15, teen football player, Bangalore
Traffic pressure could shift into calmer, more useful guidance.Rafiq, 42, taxi driver, Bangalore
Social spaces feel lighter when the mood is easier to sense.Lucia, 19, student, Madrid
These are early human signals regarding the kinds of lives and needs this project is being shaped around.
Sonic Lens is still evolving. This is where we share the latest edits, tests, thoughts, and shifts.
What the hackathon opened up: the first spark, the first prototype, the first sound from a cathedral.
How the sound-story grew from an idea about church bells into a spatial listening experience.
What we're testing now: GPU shaders reading video frames, four musical layers responding to architecture.
Designing listening modes one lens at a time. How each mode changes the relationship between eye and ear.
Sketches, reflections, next moves. The messy middle of building something new.
Fast updates from the build. New features, bug fixes, design shifts, and things we learned.
We're looking to connect with people and spaces who resonate with the project.
Sonic Lens could grow as a prototype pilot, a sound walk, an installation, a workshop, an app test, or a research conversation.
Join the early journey, propose a collaboration, or just say hello.
Thanks for reaching out. We'll be in touch.