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The Sound Carries Us – Jayabo Afuera
El sonido que nos lleva
The Sound Carries Us is an audiovisual portrait of Jayabo Afuera, a rural town in the Dominican Republic where my mother lives. Created through a process of photographic documentation and volumetric capture, the project reflects my perspective as someone shaped by both Dominican and American sensibilities—close to the culture, yet never fully inside it.
Using Gaussian splatting, I reconstructed fragments of the landscape—fences, vegetation, the geometry of the town’s quiet roads. These forms were then animated to a layered soundscape: the buzz of motorbikes, the call of birds, conversation from neighboring homes, and the rhythms of bachata music playing through nearby speakers. Long regarded as a music of emotion and everyday life, bachata became the element that bridged my sense of distance. It gave shape to belonging—not through language or lineage, but through resonance.
Animated in Blender and completed in Unreal Engine, the work visualizes sound in real time, transforming the environment into a responsive memory.
The Sound Carries Us is a gesture toward reconnection—an attempt to listen across cultural lines, to let place move through the body even when identity feels split.