Painting a Song — reviving Soy tu aire for a generation that missed it
Context
In 2009, Herraiz Soto & Co. built an interactive Flash piece for Soy tu aire, the first single from Labuat (Virginia Maestro). You moved your cursor and the song painted itself in ink across the screen, and for me it stayed as one of those pieces that showed how far interaction design could really go on the web.
Then Flash died and the piece went with it. The song is still around, the official video too, but the thing you could actually play stopped existing. All I had left was a single video someone had filmed off their own screen, and my memory of having played it back then.
Seventeen years later I brought it back as Painting a Song (Pintando una canción), so anyone who never got to play it could finally do it.
My Focus
Most of the work was reverse-engineering an interaction I only had in one surviving video and in my own memory of playing it years ago.
- ⦿Reconstructed the interaction behavior from a single surviving video and my memory of the original
- ⦿Read how it moved with my interaction-design eye, then design-engineered it back to life in just a few days, almost in one shot
- ⦿Built it end to end with Claude and Codex as copilots, from reverse-engineering to shipped page
- ⦿Chose a stack any browser runs today — PixiJS, Web Audio, generative ink
- ⦿Shipped it as new project in my Design Laboratory
Final thoughts
It's a humble recreation and the original is better crafted, I'd say that myself. I did it because it was fun, and because a piece like that deserves to still be playable by anyone who wants to.