Auralising lights and shadows: A reflection on Matteo Marangoni and and Dieter Vandoren's 'Komorebi'
Léa Shamaa
Léa Shamaa listens closely to Komorebi by Matteo Marangoni and Dieter Vandoren, exploring how light and shadow can be transformed into sound – an inquiry into the porous boundaries between nature and technology. This article is part of Writing Wildness, an editorial collection of reflections and insights emerging from the 2025 edition FIBER Festival. Writing Wildness gathers a constellation of voices reflecting on art, sound, and technology, tracing the many ways creative practices can open new pathways through which to sense and imagine the world.
While light tends to represent the visible world, the absence of light implies a silent, dark, space – because, technically, it is not actually ‘there’, at least to the human eye. What if light could be experienced through the human ear instead? And, if shadows could communicate, how could we interface with it? And, finally, what does the medium of that interface imply about auralising nature’s hidden sounds?
What drew me to the work of Matteo Marangoni is the ability to translate the organic patterns of light through electronic synthesising models. Marangoni is an artist and community organiser whose practice spans sonic rituals, DIY media, and applied utopianism. At its core, his work explores how sound and space can reconfigure the relationships between subject and object, nature, and technology. Through carefully composed spatial experiences, he invites audiences into environments where perception is unsettled and reimagined, opening space for collective reflection and experimentation. His Komorebi project, which uses speakers to embody new forms of sonic life.
For the 2020 ‘stay at home’ edition of Into The Great Wide Open, Marangoni alongside artist Dieter Vandoren, devised ‘Komorebi’ : a DIY electronics kit that transposes the shimmer of sunlight through trees into sound. ‘Komorebi’, a Japanese term describing this dappled interplay of light and leaves, becomes here not a visual but an auditory phenomenon.
The speakers – or as Marangoni called them during his talk at FIBER Festival, ‘Komorebi larva’ – pick up the gaps of light from clouds and shadows casting between trees through sensors and these pass through a synthesiser to produce a sound – a system modelled after one which allows harps to be played by windstreams. Yet, in a perhaps anthropocentric sense, Matteo’s ecoacoustic system, where lights and shadows can speak with each other, has also given a space for humans to tune into techno-driven contemplations of the wild. Sueur and Farina define the term ecoacoustics as a field which incorporates ipso facto soundscape ecology, which is the study dedicated to researching the sounds emerging from the landscape.
I could grasp the process of turning light into sound through synthesis, though it was difficult for me to understand how the different speakers in Marangoni’s project ‘spoke with’ each other. Did they know what the other was saying? Or were these automated systems simply responding to external inputs of data? In the end, I realised it was a bit of both. Unlike the harps being played by the wind, the komorebi larva are not instruments, rather, they are the agents who play them – the physical embodiments of light. However, there were two main aspects which distinguished these speakers as organic agents of electronic music: their biomimetic design and their autonomous nature.
In terms of biomimetic design, the speakers in Komorebi looked like wild yet small idle animals. With horn-like conical shapes and a transparent curved body, their presence made it look like Earth had grown little ears on its outer crust, to listen to the beams of its neighbour, the sun. Positioned in grassy green spaces, the translucent speakers make their technical nature visible while blending in certain evolutionary aspects seen in Earth’s animals. For instance, the komorebi larvae are attached to a bright red mount planted in the ground, which give them a visible hue and protect them from being stepped on by humans. This reminded me of the aposematism in animal evolution which makes use of bright body coloration as a signal of deterrence for predators to warn that these vibrant-looking creatures are actually poisonous and not worth eating. In mimicking these natural features, the speakers contribute to a wilding of technologies, which places them in an interspecies triangle between humans and the wilderness.
In terms of the autonomous nature of the larva shells, their agency is translated through their eloquent speech, which we interpret as music. Throughout human existence, and, in particular rural spaces, humans have grown familiar to the collective soundscapes of animals who croak and chirp, speaking to each other in a chorused symbiosis. In the same way that animals respond to each other, such as the repeated ribbiting of frogs by a river or the cawing of crows in the sky, the Komorebi Larva are able to auralise a phenomenon which operates like communication rather than a simulation of it. The funneled speakers react to each other to the rhythm of lights and shadows, in a language foreign to human understanding. As the light of the sun speaks to Earth’s many surfaces, casting its weightless words onto it, its mother tongue is siphoned into human ears as constantly changing ambience coming from these horn-like shells.
While the music emitted in Komorebi paints the shadows world in a beautiful light, the frame of that sonic painting is just as important. To repeat the ideas in Marangoni’s talk, the synthesised music forms a ‘frame of awareness’ of the natural world by using technology to tune into things sonically. In doing so, it positions technological objects as partners of natural life on Earth rather than fueling dystopian visions of a techno-centric world where technology reigns over nature while alienating us from the world. Throughout my writing, I have often highlighted the alienating nature of everyday technologies and their capacity to bind people in their cyberspaces. The alienating capacity of tech from the natural world can be felt in metaphors of ‘the cloud’ and how it contributes to immaterial and concealed ideals of technology. Füsun Türetken writes in her article ‘Where They Hide the Clouds’, published in the book Acid Clouds:
The sky is constituted by invisible floating water and metallic particles. Weather clouds evoke a sense of weightless solidity. Sometimes they’re opaque, some- times translucent. Clouds are the sky in motion, fleeting from place to place. Clouds are a matter of life and death. One cannot escape the clouds. One cannot escape the sky. The word ‘sky’ conjures images of a lofty and unreachable dome, one distinctly separated from the Earth.
In Marangoni’s work, however, the technical interfaces are bound to a natural context which divert the human gaze back to the environment. In exposing humans to the hidden sonic strings of light, Komorebi shows the potential of technologies to bring us closer to the natural world, rather than alienate us from it, disrupting the critique of modern technologies as objects of estrangements. But, what does it mean to experience nature through technological intervention? In listening to the world through synthesising mediums, does that experience give more power to the organic or non-organic world?
On one hand, the speakers’ collective and autonomous communication grants them the power to channel their own symphonies. On the other, this communication-as-music remains in service of our listening, tuned to the pleasure of human ears. Between these two hands lies the holistic beauty of ecoacoustics: an inquiry into the passive acoustics of the environment, where the many separate voices of a landscape weave together into a total symphony.
Léa Shamaa is a writer and anthropologist based in Amsterdam. Her research currently intersects between natural and digital spaces, and the community practices within them, which she describes through creative and interactive storytelling.