Cornell Sunset｜Ivan Gong

Click on the image at the bottom to listen🎵.

Visual Artist: Ivan Gong (Instagram: ivangong_official)
Ivan Gong is a visual storyteller whose work blends natural beauty with emotional depth. Through photography, he captures stillness in motion and sound hidden in silence.

Background Story
Date: March 2025
Location: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

This photograph was taken on a quiet evening in early spring. The silhouette of a pine tree rises against a painted sky—violet, rose, and deep blue—marking the day's retreat. The sunset doesn’t burst; it lingers, stretches, exhales. There is no rush, only a soft descent into night.
It is a scene of stillness and shift, solitude and breath. The frame holds both the structure of the land and the freedom of the sky, capturing the rhythm of a moment when light begins to dissolve into memory.

Musical Interpretation | Lo-fi Soul from the American Sky
American music, particularly hip-hop, has always been rooted in rhythm, reflection, and reinvention. Through semiotics, we decoded the image as a layered text—each color, shadow, and shape became a symbol, reinterpreted in sound:

The purple-blue sky becomes ambient pads and minor keys, evoking emotional depth and contemplation
The fading orange hues are rendered in warm, sunset piano chords, drawing on jazz and soul influences
The silhouetted tree serves as the pulse of the track—its structure imagined as a lazy lo-fi groove with syncopated rhythms
The landscape itself reflects the American blend of raw texture and poetic rhythm, reimagined through trap-infused beatwork and soft 808s
The result is a sonic portrait of the Cornell sunset—where the horizon hums, and memory becomes music.

Sound Keywords
Lo-fi hip-hop with sunset piano, soulful trap beat, ambient pads, vinyl crackle, soft 808s, jazz trumpet accents, tree silhouette rhythm, dusk sky colors, reflective and warm, 72 BPM

Note Sequence (Color-to-Sound Mapping)
G (Middle), G (Middle), G (Low), G (Low), C (Middle), C (Middle), C (Low), C (Low)