Project Photo/sound
Ice cave

The sound piece is born as a perceptive translation of the Icelandic landscape, using the sonification of images as a strategy to explore the contrasts that emerge from both the visual and the sound.

From this photographic series taken in different parts of Iceland, a composition is configured that does not seek to directly represent the environment, but rather to reconstruct it from the listening, from the subtlety of what is not seen but vibrates, from the visual memory transformed into acoustic experience. Iceland is a territory where the landscape is imposed by its extremes: ice and fire, fog and light, emptiness and dense textures. It is in this tension, in this marauding between opposing forces, that the sound aesthetics of the work is configured.

Each photograph was analyzed not only in terms of color and form, but also in its capacity to contain silences, pauses, minimal details that, visually, could go unnoticed, but when translated into the language of sound, acquire a delicate presence. The subtle contrasts thus become a fundamental layer of the piece. This is revealed only to the one who is willing to listen carefully; what is present and what is manifested in the slight vibration. In this sense the piece invites an active, almost meditative listening, where the essential is found more in the texture than in the melody.The sonification was made using data extracted from the images: chromatic density, tonal contrasts, distribution of shapes, and proportions between elements. These variables were translated into parameters, such as frequency, rhythm, amplitude. Thus, a dark and compact area can become a low and stable frequency, while a diffuse cloud can give rise to a high-pitched, almost imperceptible hum. The goal was not to illustrate the images, but to unfold their atmosphere from another sense: to make audible the silence of the glacier, the brutality of a volcanic rock, and the “silence” of the ice caves.

Conceptually, this piece is situated in the space between the visible and the audible, proposing an expanded sensory experience. Contrast, as a formal and poetic principle, structures the entire work: contrast between dense sounds and empty spaces, between the rough and the smooth, between the evident and the subtle. Subtlety, then, is not only an aesthetic quality, but a form of resistance that I consider to be very present in the Icelandic landscape, and this in contrast to the excess of sounds of the capital cities and the current contemporary fast movement in which we live. It is an ode to slow but constant movement. Through this work, the subtle emerges as a poetics of attention, as a way of looking, listening and rethinking a landscape, that which is hidden beneath the surface.

Visual fragment of the sound of caves, 2025

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