Day: November 1, 2026

By: Elena Mart

A small artificial flame flickers behind a sheet of smart film. A nearby photovoltaic cell picks up the light and turns its changing intensity into a low electronic tone. In Octavio Figueroa’s Declipse (2026), the setup is simple: lamp, shadow, receiver, sound. But the work also shows how easily one medium can become another.

That mix of sound, light, and technology appears throughout Figueroa’s work.

Figueroa is a Mexican musician, interactive sound designer, and educator. He works with composition, electronics, instruments, and installations. His projects often start with familiar things such as a light, a camera, or a pair of dice. He then uses them to make or find sound. The audience is usually asked to take part rather than only listen.

Figueroa started with more traditional music. He studied Contemporary Music Composition at Centro Universitario de Música Fermatta and later earned a master’s degree in Music Composition for Audiovisual Media at the University of Chichester. He says moving from regular composition to screen music and then interactive music felt natural. As an undergraduate, he was already testing code and unusual VSTs. Those experiments later brought him to NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. After graduating, he became a Research Resident there. At ITP, he worked with candles, wine glasses, EEG, TouchDesigner, robots, and many other tools. But light quickly became the material he wanted to keep exploring.

His first experiments with light were simple. The first project he made with a microcontroller used a color sensor to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Later, he felt the system was too arbitrary. Red might trigger one note, but there was no real link between the color and the sound. He wanted a more direct way to turn light into sound. That search later became what he calls lightsound.

In Before the Music Dice, physical dice control a machine-vision musical instrument. Different combinations create different musical results, and a local machine-learning model reads the symbols fast enough for the system to respond like an instrument.

The piece is playful, and the action is simple. Roll the dice, and something happens. Figueroa says new interfaces help keep music from becoming routine. When music is your job, habit and muscle memory can take over. A new instrument breaks that pattern. “Suddenly producing a simple note feels like a little miracle,” he says. He wants the audience to feel some of that surprise too.

He kept that same direct approach when he began working more with light.

A Lit Room Is a Secret Score, made with Andre Lira, uses a photosensitive headset that lets the wearer hear the light they are looking at. LED filaments carry sound through the room. As the listener moves, what they hear changes with their position.

El Fotonium takes the idea further. Figueroa calls it “pure transduction”: light becomes sound without software or hidden digital processing. He had been working with TinyML and MAX MSP, but he missed the quick response and small details of a musical instrument. He also wanted a simpler system. “Why jump to the computer and the depth camera when you could achieve the same with lightbulbs and solar panels?” he asks. The light modules can be tuned and moved, while photovoltaic receivers detect the flicker and turn it into sound.

The result is a synthesizer that becomes clear through use. Move a light or change its angle and the sound changes. Figueroa calls El Fotonium a “love letter” to homemade electronics.

His process is also open. He says he often spends weeks testing things before he decides what he is making. He does not like treating an artwork as a design problem with one fixed solution. For him, the testing period is part of finding the work.

This work came together in Parpadeos: Works in Lightsound, Figueroa’s recent solo exhibition at ASPACE Gallery in Brooklyn. The show ran October 18–20, 2026, and brought together five works based on sound carried through light. Figueroa says he knew he wanted to keep working with light and sound after the first public performance of El Fotonium. Before that, people often asked technical questions or said a project was “cool.” This time, strangers told him the work was beautiful and that it had touched them. That reaction mattered because it showed the work could connect with people beyond the technology.

In the gallery, El Fotonium spread separate pitches across a wall. Ni sus luces placed four musical voices inside a small group of glowing filaments. Visitors used receivers to hear single sounds or let several parts overlap.

Declipse used the same basic idea in a quieter way. It combined a flame-effect lamp, smart film, and a photovoltaic cell. The artificial flame produced a warm drone, and changes in light changed the sound.

It barely looks like a normal instrument. There are no keys and no familiar controls. A fake flame, a sheet of material, and a sensor are enough to link image and sound.

Figueroa says the goal is not only to make a new kind of interface. He wants people to reconnect with their own musicality, including people who do not think of themselves as musicians.

That can mean rolling dice, walking through a room with a photosensitive headset, or moving a receiver in front of a light. The technology may be complex, but the action is usually simple.

He also keeps much of the hardware visible. Wires, circuit boards, sensors, magnets, and photovoltaic cells remain part of the work. Viewers may not know every technical detail, but they can still see how the parts connect.

For Figueroa, interactive instruments also mean sharing some control with the audience. The artist sets the system, but the person using it helps decide what happens.

Now he wants to make the work much larger. He says every piece in Parpadeos was designed so it could scale up. His next step is a large immersive version of the show where people can walk through the works and affect how other visitors hear the sound.