Sound Palette Initiative
Where music meets technology, and imagination becomes experience.
Merging experimental technologies with original music, Sound Palette creates immersive audiovisual works that invite audiences into poetic, emotional, and multisensory journeys — crafting sonic experiences with purpose and soul.
What is Sound Palette?
Sound Palette is an interdisciplinary performance initiative created by harpist and composer Renée Qin as part of her ongoing artistic and academic exploration at Stanford University. It merges music, technology, and visual design to create original, immersive works that explore themes of memory, environment, human fragility, and connection.
Rooted in storytelling and deep emotional resonance, Sound Palette is more than a concert series—it is a way of listening, and remembering.
At its heart, Sound Palette is about creating beauty through innovation — transforming experimental concepts into emotionally resonant experiences that connect art, science, and the senses.
Why We Create?
Art with Purpose
Every composition within Sound Palette carries a story:
“The Ternaround” - A solo for harp inspired by the endangered California least tern—echoing bird calls and fragile ecosystems through resonance and restraint.
“Introduce Myself to Mom Today, I’ll Do It Again Tomorrow”- An elegy to memory loss and Alzheimer's, told through fragile melodies, narration, and dissolving harmonies.
Where Memory Begins - A musical meditation on childhood memory, time, and the echoes of a mother’s voice—combining harp, music boxes, and layered textures.
Call from Afar
A sonic dialogue with the deep ocean. Built from sound of whales, this piece reflects the mystery and loneliness of distant voices across ecosystems.Voice of the Planet - A choral and instrumental invocation of Earth’s voice—fusing breath, speech, and sound into one resonant call for environmental awareness.
Touching Water - An interactive audiovisual system where water becomes instrument. Through gesture, the audience sonifies the physical world—blurring the boundary between performer and environment.
Celestial Sparks - A real-time visual sequencer inspired by fireworks and the night sky—mapping gesture and rhythm into bursts of light and color.
Blue Hour - A twilight meditation between day and night. Blue Hour explores liminality—between light and dark, land and sky, memory and dream.
At the Edge of Time - The closing reflection. Time dissolves into starlight in this final piece—where everything expands outward, beyond sound, beyond gravity, beyond self.
This is music as empathy. This is sound as storytelling.
Our Technology
Technology as Sensation
We build our own tools!
Sound Palette uses a range of custom-designed tools to translate abstract concepts into embodied experience. These tools are developed by Renée and her team using ChucK, ChuGL, (a programming language developed at Stanford University) and other generative frameworks.
🎛️ Touching Water — A water-triggered audio performance system that responds to contact and gestures, turning physical interaction into musical expression.
✨ Firework Sequencer — A responsive generative audio-visual system that mimics the ignition of fireworks shooting stars, connected to sound onset
🌀 Spectral Visualizations — Real-time visualizer that respond live performance in real-time, built in a custom-coded engine and design.
These are not simply tools—they are systems of storytelling. Each one extends the performer’s voice into visual and spatial dimensions.
Featured Project
Beneath the Waves, Beyond the Stars
World Premiered:
April 5, 2025 Stanford University
The debut production of Sound Palette weaves live harp, electronics, ensemble, and interactive visuals into an evocative exploration of memory and nature.
From the voice of a whale to gesture-triggered sound with light trails, the performance reimagines storytelling through sound and code.
Highlights
Original compositions by Renée Qin
Firework-inspired sequencer and interactive visuals
Real whale calls, water, and cosmic motifs
Live ensemble: harp, strings, piano, percussion
Custom-built audiovisual software using ChucK and ChuGL
[ 📖 View Program & Media ]
