During my junior fall semester at Harvard, I took GenEd 1080 - How Music Works: Engineering the Acoustical World. This class approached music from an engineering perspective. We explored music, acoustics, and musical instruments through physics, mathematics, and engineering. GenEd 1080 encouraged and created many opportunities for hands-on learning. For the final project, I set out to sonify famous paintings such as The Starry Night, Mona Lisa, The Creation of Adam, and other visual forms.

I used digital image representations of these paintings which helped extend this project to sonify any image such as a photograph. The image acts as the compositional map. To create sound, I wrote a Python script using the Pyo audio processing library to convert the RGB values of the image into a string of sounds. In the final paper, I first present current research and background about the topic. Then, the project's motivations are examined. Next, the implementation, analysis, and demonstration of the sonification of art are presented. Finally, the paper concludes with reflections.