Resonance: What Sound Feels Like
I made an interactive portrait of how sound feels across my lower lip and chin, using a 3D scan, flowers, and anemones.
Choose a sound; drag to turn the face. Headphones are optional. The scene respects your device’s reduced-motion setting.
Open full-windowI lost most sensation across my lower lip and chin after a surgery damaged my inferior alveolar nerve. At a sound bath, I discovered that resonance could become sensation in the very parts of my face where I had lost feeling.
Resonance is an interactive representation of that experience. The flowers and anemones wrap around a 3D scan of my face, staying with the contours of my lower lip and chin as the view turns.
Three ways of feeling sound
The singing bowl brings sunflowers into bloom. Their petals unfold and their heads gradually turn toward the sound, with moving sunshine behind them.
With chimes, fresh clusters of verbena open at each strike. The flowers accumulate through the sound rather than blooming all at once.
The tuning fork brings anemones into motion. Fish keep swimming through the tentacles on their own, independent of the sound.
Making it
The botanical and underwater scenes were authored in Blender and exported as GLB models. Three.js renders the face and its attached fields in the browser. The three sound samples are synthesized with the Web Audio API.
The connection between sound and movement is specific to each scene: turning toward a source, opening at a strike, or moving with a sustained tone. The face remains the surface that holds those sensations together.