LUMEN is a new music ecosystem for intentional listening. It combines beautifully designed album booklets with a bespoke speaker and mesmerizing visualizer. Each booklet contains a special tag that unlocks the album audio by tapping the speaker.

Inspired by the tactile experience of vinyl listening, LUMEN enables a slower, more engaging journey for listeners, and a more sustainable financial model for music creators. The result is a meditative listening experience born from the intersection of digital and physical media.

Background

LUMEN is the culmination of a dream I had many years ago — a curiosity about how to combine the tactile experience of physical media with the expressiveness of digital media, along with a speculative future where musicians have a new viable means to fund their work. The project explores themes of collections and collectibility, mindfulness, natural materials, handicraft, ritual and nostalgia, bringing together the emotional connection of a tangible media format with the rich possibilities of digital technology. By grounding music listening in a tactile ritual, I ask users to consider how collective cultural memory is encoded in physical objects, and how the listening experience may change when matched with a physical talisman.

Technical Details

The LUMEN ecosystem consists of a series of artist booklets with embedded NFC stickers, along with a hardware audio player and visualizer. Tapping the booklet on the audio player begins playback of the album, along with a audio-reactive visualization of the music based on colors from the album art. The prototype player is built from a Teensy microcontroller, custom electronics, two 3.5" speakers, and a 32 x 32 low-res LED matrix. For the enclosure, I used a combination of CNC and traditional woodworking to create a wooden box reminiscent of hi-fi speakers from the 1970's. I wrote custom Arduino code to play back audio, generate the visualizations and respond to user input via the hardware media controls. For the prototype, all audio was stored internally on flash storage, but in future versions there will be a backend server for storing and distributing the audio files.

LUMEN was presented as an installation at the NYU ITP/IMA/Low-Res Spring Show 2025 in New York as well as the Low-Res Thesis Show 2025 in Shanghai.