At first glance, Parpadeos: Works in Lightsound by Octavio Figueroa looked almost silent. A series of small black modules lined a white wall, and curved LED filaments emitted saturated pink, green, and white light. However, once you put on the headphones and brought a handheld receiver up to the lights, the exhibition suddenly came alive.

Presented at Aspace Gallery in Brooklyn 18–20 Oct 2026, Parpadeos featured five installations, all based on what Figueroa calls 'lightsound'. Instead of playing sound through speakers, the light itself carried it: light-sensitive receivers made pitches, rhythms, and musical parts audible.

Much of it was invisible. The LEDs that appeared steady to the eye were, in fact, rapidly modulating and carrying the signal the receiver would then translate back into sound. Move the receiver even a little, and the sound through the headphones would change.

This made watching other people go through the exhibition almost as interesting as doing it yourself. People moved very slowly past the works, holding their receivers right up to the individual lights, then pulling away and coming back from a different angle. Without the headphones, the gallery was quite quiet. Much of the music was effectively private, existing only between the light, the receiver, and the person listening.

One of the exhibition's key works was El Fotonium (2025), which spread the system across a large section of the gallery wall. A grid of pale panels held small LED emitters in black 3D-printed cases. Each emitter carried its own pitch. The pitch came from the frequency of the light's flicker, which photovoltaic receivers detected and converted into sound. Polarizing filters also made volume responsive to orientation, so tilting an emitter or receiver could make a note louder, softer, or disappear. The modules were magnetic and could be rearranged, allowing separate notes to stay distinct or cluster into denser sounds.

Rather than standing in front of the piece and hearing a finished composition, you had to go out and find it. You brought the receiver up to one emitter and picked up a particular sound. Moving across the wall to the next emitter would give you another sound. Distance and position shaped how the work was experienced.

People approached El Fotonium very carefully. Some would stop at one module and then move on to the next; others would sweep the receiver across several sources, listening to the output in their headphones. From a distance, their movements looked like mixing or conducting, even though the room was silent.

The installation was a study in restrained appearance. The black modules, exposed electronics, and pale panels they were mounted on all looked like lab equipment. It made no attempt to hide how it worked. Most of the visible change came from the visitor: where they stood, which module they aimed at, and how long they stayed with a sound.

Ni sus luces (2026) produced a more focused version of the same concept. Four individual LED filaments each carried a separate musical part. Bringing the receiver close to one filament isolated that voice, while pulling it back let the other parts come through as well.

The installation was physically simple: four curved lines of light, some visible wiring, and a receiver in the visitor's hand. It was one of the most carefully attended to pieces in the show. People would come right up to it and make small adjustments above and between the filaments, listening for the point where one voice met the other.

There was no button to switch between solo and ensemble. It was all about distance. A few inches and you went from a single line to several overlapping lines, and as you moved back further, you eventually got the four parts forming a choir.

The contrast between El Fotonium and Ni sus luces also lay in how the same lightsound system behaved. In El Fotonium, the sound spread across the wall, and the listener effectively searched through a field of separate pitches. In Ni sus luces, the voices were all very close together, and the listener could choose how much of that group they wanted to hear at any one time.

Three other works took the technique in different directions. Longtime (2025) used an LED matrix whose image remained static even as it redrew itself thousands of times per second, with each grid band carrying a different musical voice. Declipse (2026) combined a flame effect lamp with smart film and a photovoltaic cell, repeatedly filtering an artificial light source to generate a warm electronic drone. Mi caja es su caja (2026) invited visitors to move the LED filaments around the magnetic contacts, altering the rhythms they produced.

A nearby presentation on earlier examples of sound transmitted via light provided some historical context for the show. You did not need that background to start using the works. Figueroa left the circuit boards, wires, sensors, and light sources visible, so the technology never felt sealed off from the experience. Most visitors could begin by picking up a receiver and testing it against the lights.

That simplicity shaped the way visitors approached the exhibition. Parpadeos was less about explaining the technology than about letting visitors discover what it could do. Someone standing by without the headphones might see nothing more than a person very slowly moving a small device in front of an LED. For the person wearing the headphones, that same movement could isolate a voice, introduce a different rhythm, or bring a number of sounds together.

Parpadeos is the Spanish word for blinks or flickers. In the exhibition, many of those flickers were too fast to be seen. A seemingly constant light could carry a changing musical signal, and a seemingly quiet room could carry sound in multiple places at once.

By the end, listening had become something you did with your whole body as much as with your ears. You'd move in, move out, raise a receiver, and search through the light. The music was already there; the point was finding it.

Parpadeos: Works in Lightsound, a solo exhibition by Octavio Figueroa, was on view October 18–20, 2026, at ASPACE Gallery, 13 Grattan St #402, Brooklyn, NY 11206.