In her exhibition, Soundstitching: Sites and Sounds of Willa Cather’s World, Cassia Kite uses her distinctive Soundstitching process to transform the colors from hand-stitched images of Cather, her childhood home, the Red Cloud Opera House, Burlington Depot, and the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie into playable musical compositions, creating a multidisciplinary and multisensory experience.

What is Soundstitching?

Soundstitching is an experimental, interdisciplinary, and integrative project developed by Kite to create a dialogue between visual art and music through the translation of color into sounds. It is a way for a representational image to have its own unique song associated with it, while also giving a traditional form of art, such as hand stitching, a new way to be interpreted.

The Soundstitching process starts with a hand-stitched image, which Kite converts to a color map that is then translated into a color scale on the piano, assigning each color to a piano key. Following the order of the color maps, Kite then uses the piano color scale to assign musical notes to the scale, creating a musical composition. Kite’s musical collaborators are then able to use the piece to arrange their own composition. This process results in an art piece that documents the steps in the process of composing music through a hand-stitched image.

Limited editions prints, notecards, and other merch featuring images from this exhibit are available in our bookstore.