The title Reverie/Repose evokes daydreaming and restful tranquillity, offering personal restoration in contemplative spaces. In slowing down, taking pause and listening, we open ourselves to deeper modes, attuning us to the subtleties of perception.

As you approach a video, the “Play” button will trigger it to begin. “Pause” gently fades it out. “Pitch Shift” changes both pitch and speed.“Ambience” adds a soft, textured layer to the soundscape. The videos include sustained, slightly detuned violin drones, bowed bells that sound like sine tones, and a megaphone with feedback and cryptic phrases. Each trigger generates new microtonal intervals. Some zones respond to your movement with bells, gongs, low tones, and tape textures. These pitch shift with each activation. You can add a glissando effect by pressing C or V, applying a sliding pitch to all sounds. Pressed repeatedly, it creates longer, more dramatic slides.

As you climb a set of stairs, a video fades in, showing marbles and a rubber ball rolling across a Chinese cymbal. Other triggers activate clarinet multiphonics, grain delays and digital effects that shape the texture, modulated in real-time by low-frequency oscillators. Large double bass bows float in the air, bowing the metal plate you stand on, turning the floor into a resonant surface.

There’s also a gun, which you use as a percussion instrument. Each shot triggers different sounds like Tibetan singing bowls, Indonesian gamelan, temple blocks, and kendang drum, which correlate to different coloured projectiles.

Fragments of dialogue appear on screen in an open-ended narrative. Inspired by Saul Bass’s 1974 film ‘Phase IV’ — a sci-fi horror where hyper-intelligent ants wage war on humans. It has an eerie sense of sentience, as if the world itself is shifting beyond our understanding. Another influence Laurie Anderson’s ‘Puppet Motel. The game uses QuickTime videos, full of music, monologues, art-jokes. Anderson describes it as “back-of-the-brain thinking. It moves away from traditional gameplay in favour of surreal, exploratory play.

The game world is immersive yet estranged, creating perceptual tension. Sound itself becomes an aporia—circling a threshold in continual renvoi. Jean-Luc Nancy asks, “What is listening, beyond meaning?” For him, listening is a sensation. It is resonance.

But what does it mean to engage with an intermedial apparatus where sound resists signification? Where sound is a relational force that modulates attention, shapes perceptual space, and unsettles sense-making? In a world of non-directive, non-semantic sound, what forms of identity and agency might emerge?

I wanted the game to be a philosophical encounter, shaped by material presence and immediacy, with composition as a parallel modality.

Here, sound is vibrant, affective material.