Synesthesia
Using generative art to map your music taste into a personal visual signature
Problem
Music experiences can feel flattened. Streaming turns taste into a feed, live shows often end with expensive merch that carries little utility, and the connection between artist, listener, and moment rarely becomes something lasting. Synesthesia explored a more personal bridge between listening and ownership: turning a person’s music history into generative art that could also unlock future perks, access, or experiences.
Architecture
The initial experience mapped a person’s Sound.xyz collection into a visual output, using genre as the bridge between music and color. A Go GraphQL backend queried Sound.xyz for a user’s sounds, while the React frontend fetched stats after wallet connection. If someone had not collected any sounds, the app fell back to liked tracks, and if there were none, it guided them back toward listening and collecting first. State lived across React hooks and XState, with React Spring handling transitions. Minting used an Art Blocks contract to generate a unique hash that became the input for the final generative artwork.
Development
My work started with figuring out which stats were worth querying and what the API needed to support. The early direction was more numerical, but I pushed the concept toward color and genre so the output could show similarity in taste without losing uniqueness. I built the API with gqlgen, helped shape the blockchain integration, and then worked on the frontend in parallel with design. One interaction I introduced was a grayscale interface before wallet connection that shifted into the user’s mapped colors once their stats loaded. Details like the Synth card and stats reel used React Spring to make the experience feel more alive without overpowering the art.
Learnings
Synesthesia taught me how much meaning can come from the translation layer between data and art. The project also made the live event opportunity clearer: if a listening history can become visual identity, an event can become a collectible memory with future utility. That thread eventually fed into Waves, and it sharpened how I think about generative art as a way to deepen the relationship between artists and fans.