Amodal approaches to audio-laser synthesis

Abstract Audio-laser synthesis – where audio-rate voltage simultaneously drives laser projection and produces sound – offers a unique paradigm for intermedial composition: a practice where the question is not how to join two media streams, but how to compose with a source signal transduced into both sound and light without prioritising either. In response, this article mobilises affect theory and psychologist Daniel Stern’s developmental ‘vitality affects’ as a compositional framework for the medium. Through a survey of the techno-aesthetics of audio-laser synthesis and the authors’ practice-based research, both designing and performing the audio-laser synthesiser Phosphene , analytic-compositional strategies are developed that foreground amodal modulation over domain-specific aesthetics.