Blue Hour

The sky doesn’t always follow the rules.

Blue Hour is inspired by an unexpected encounter—witnessing the northern lights flickering over the Bay Area, a place where such phenomena are rare. Twice in 2024, strong geomagnetic storms lit up the skies of Northern California, turning the familiar horizon into something otherworldly. I stood on the Stanford campus, beneath a sky I thought I knew, watching streaks of purple and pink ripple across the night.

It wasn’t supposed to be there.
But it was. 

This piece is born from that fleeting wonder. The northern lights appear when bursts of solar wind collide with Earth’s magnetic field, sending streams of charged particles cascading into the atmosphere. The result is a cosmic interaction—energy made visible, light that breathes and dissolves into darkness.

In Blue Hour, sound behaves like light. Musical textures created with extended harp techniques ripple and pulse, rising and fading like waves in the sky. The harp traces delicate arcs—sometimes sharp and bright, sometimes faint and distant—like the edges of light that flicker, shimmer, and vanish before you can fully grasp them. The rhythms are unpredictable, much like the northern light itself—at times suspended in stillness, at others bursting into motion without warning.

The visuals aren’t just a backdrop—they are part of the music. Shapes and colors emerge, shift, and dissolve in real time, reflecting the fleeting, magnetic dance of light that once turned the night sky into a living canvas.

Auroras aren’t supposed to happen here.
But they did.

And for a moment, the sky reminded us—
even the most familiar places can hold impossible beauty.

Auroras don’t leave marks behind.
But they leave something else—
a memory written in light.