Passages is a generative music and media work that emerges from landscape, time, and translation. At its heart are seven musical compositions born from the Inside Passage — the coastal waterway weaving through the fjords and islands of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. These compositions are not merely recorded responses to place; they are created through a process of video segment–to–sound synthesis, in which time-lapsed visual segments of the Passage’s shifting scenery are transformed algorithmically into sound material. The completed music is then synchronized back to the source time-lapse videos, creating an intimate performance between image and sound that expresses the feeling of landscape as passage, movement, and duration.
By letting the visual rhythms of environment inform sound, Passages challenges conventional boundaries between what we see and what we hear. The project foregrounds landscape as a generator of creative logic — where time-lapse sequences of sea, sky, and shoreline become score and structure, not backdrop. In translating light, motion, and color into sonic texture, the work embodies the rarely articulated interplay between perception and environment, inviting listeners to hear place as richly and complexly as they see it.
This transformation also reflects on the experience of duration itself — of moving through space over time, of the shifting tides of light and sound, of the embodied stillness that comes with attentive observation. The Inside Passage, with its glacial reflections, tidal currents, and mutable weather, becomes both a collaborator and a composer, guiding the generative processes that birth new sonic worlds. Passages is thus not a simple soundtrack to place; it is a meditation on continuity, transition, and the poetic resonance of landscape as temporal companion.
