A spline-based editor turning visual art into spatial sound for the blind.
MonaListen won 2 award categories during Hacklanta '26, namely:
Learn about / try the project for yourself below!
Visual art exists for the eye.
But for 295 million people worldwide, that experience is out of reach due to severe vision impairment.
From the Louvre to the Tate Modern, blind visitors drift helplessly through art galleries: dragged around by companions, unable to trace the winding contours of a Renaissance fresco for themselves. Art galleries have historically offered almost no services for blind visitors. After all, how could a blind viewer experience a visual-medium artwork... or can they?
Picture a landscape painting of a stream at the foot of a mountain. MonaListen gives artists a visual editor to draw regions, attach generated sound effects, and see live edits to falloff curves and blend radius. Using a live link, a blind visitor points their phone at the painting, moves their hand up/down in space, and hears each sound grow in volume within the mix as the corresponding region is approached.
A visual artist uploads images of their artwork, then uses an editor to place point emitters or draw spline-bounded audio regions across the piece. For each region, they write a text prompt to generate a looping sound effect tied to that part of the painting: from the steady rush of the river to the turbulent wind at the mountaintop. As a music producer myself, I designed the sound controls with care. Artists can spatially configure how each sound blends with distance, choose a falloff curve, and pan either left/right with a simple slider. The finished soundscape is saved with a live link for viewers to use.
A friend helps the blind viewer open the shared link on their phone. Spoken instructions guide their hand until the phone camera intersects the painting, entering the sound landscape the artist built: with a pair of earbuds on, a blind viewer simply moves their phone across the artwork to traverse its coordinate space: exploring the sounds of a living, spatial scene entirely by ear.