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Jeanne Stern ´03: Creating "Eye Music"

May 06, 2003

"Art is not just about being able to see something and draw it well; it is also about the way you interpret and present an image," says Jeanne Stern '03. Jeanne's senior project, which she worked on as part of the certificate program of the college's Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, is a remarkable demonstration of how humans interact with art. Using a machine called an eye tracker, Jeanne can measure the experience of viewing a visual image by recording a viewer's eye movements. A computer then translates the eye movements and the subject of view into electronic music, which is played back to the viewer in real time. To accomplish this, Jeanne had to build her own eye tracker, and she is now programming the computer to interpret the eye tracker's data.

Her project, which she calls "Eye Music," is one of several being completed by students in the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology. Students take courses in art and computer science, as well as foundational courses examining the relationship between art and technology. They receive funded internships at the end of their junior year. Then, in their senior year, their work culminates in an integrative project.

Jeanne was first drawn to the Ammerman Center because of her interest in art, which is her major, and was reluctant to take the required computer science classes. To her surprise, she found she enjoyed computer science so much that she decided to make it her minor. It was in an introductory psychology course that Jeanne first learned about eye trackers, which have been used to show that people tend to focus on the eyes when presented with an image of a face. Jeanne's art background had taught her to pay attention to the way a person's gaze travels over a painting. After taking an electronic music class, Jeanne began to think about the relationship between visual and aural compositions. She realized that while a painting is static, a person's experience of that painting follows a timeline just as music does. Because eye trackers are extremely expensive, Jeanne obtained funding to buy one unassembled and built one herself.

For her internship, Jeanne chose to split the summer into two work experiences. The first internship was at Sonalysts in Waterford, Conn. where she worked in the animation department. For the second half of the summer she worked at the MIT Media Lab, where eye trackers are used to study holography.

In her free time Jeanne is the program director at WCNI, the college radio station, and hosts a show of New Wave music.

In the fall she will begin a program to earn an MFA in film production at the University of Texas in Austin. Her area of concentration, "Convergent Media," combines film with other media such as animation and electronic music.

View the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology site.

For media inquiries contact: Deborah MacDonnell (860) 439-2504, dmacdonn@conncoll.edu; or Caroline Gransee (860) 439-2508, cgransee@conncoll.edu