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). As the song played, your cursor painted ink across the screen — a small landmark of what interaction design could feel like on the web.
When Flash died, the experience went with it. The song and its video are still online; the interactive piece is what disappeared. All that survived was one video someone filmed off their screen, and my memory of playing it.
Seventeen years later I brought that experience back as Painting a Song (Pintando una canción) — just so it could be played again by anyone who never got to.
My Focus
The hard part wasn't the code — it was reverse-engineering an interaction I could only see in one surviving video and remember from playing it, years ago.
- ⦿Reconstructed the interaction behavior from a single surviving video and my own memory of the original
- ⦿Leaned on interaction-design instinct to read how it moved, then design-engineered it back to life in days — close to 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 not a remaster, and I'd be the first to say that the original is better crafted. But I had fun bringing it back.