As naturally curious people, we began Hey Aura Ray as a project to see if we could build our own aura photography camera. Not only did we accomplish that, but we transformed the aura photography experience into something transcendent. It is not just one image capturing one moment, but instead a multidimensional, multidisciplinary journey of your energy through space and time.

YOUR journey through space and time

For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists alike have been pondering the nature of our existence. For many, there is no separation between who we are physically and spiritually. The body, the cosmos, color, and music are expressions of the same underlying order. You can find it in the zodiac wheel, the color wheel, and the circle of fifths. You can find it in your eyes and in galaxies. Pythagoras found it in ratios. Plato wrote it into philosophy. Ptolemy mapped it onto the zodiac. Johannes Kepler used it to describe the motion of planets. Isaac Newton built it into the visible spectrum. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made it emotional. Modern science gave us a way to measure it in real time.

Your reading begins with your hands. Your nervous system is electric, and your hands are where that electricity is easiest to read. When you place your hands on the Aura Ray Instrument, two signals are captured: how well your skin conducts that electricity and your skin's temperature. Together they describe the state of your autonomic nervous system in this moment. This is happening beneath conscious thought.

That signal is translated into color using the seven-band spectrum Newton named in the 1660s: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Newton chose seven deliberately to mirror the seven notes of the diatonic scale. The same seven colors appear in traditional systems of energy mapping across cultures, where they've long been associated with the same emotional and spiritual qualities: red with vitality, violet with intuition, and every color in between.

Your journey unfolds over thirty seconds and leaves five kinds of records: photographs that capture your energy at distinct moments, readings originally written for this project that translate what your aura represents, an unwavering ray of light that shows how it moved through the whole journey, a tone composed from your zodiac sign and your aura color, and a transformative visualization of this tone. The photographs are your aura in space. The ray of light is your aura in time. The visualization of your sonic signature is the two woven together — a piece of art that belongs only to your reading.

"Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time." Jean-Michel Basquiat

Your aura journey decorates both.

OUR AURA PHILOSOPHY

The Meaning of Colors

Throughout time and across different cultures, humans have kept arriving at the same color language for the same states of being and that is the basis for our system.

Red, orange, and yellow on the warm end of the spectrum have been associated with energy, activation, and outward movement. Fire, heat, the sun.

Blue, indigo, and violet on the cool end of the spectrum have been associated with calm, intuition, and receptivity. Sky, water, shadows, night.

Green, at the center, has been associated with harmony, balance, and nature. The color where warmth and coolness meet.

These associations show up again and again. They appear in the traditional seven-color energy systems of Eastern spiritual traditions, where each color corresponds to a center of the body and a quality of being. They appear in Goethe's Theory of Colours, which held that color is as much a psychological experience as it is a physical property of light and that a person's encounter with a color carries emotional meaning. Newton described what light physically is, while Goethe described how color affects us when we see it. 

Goethe’s observations were taken up by the Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933, whose color curriculum ran directly through Goethe's ideas. In 1950, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Remarks on Colour, returned to the same question of why the physics of color does not explain our experience of it, working out in his own way why Goethe had been right to insist the two were not the same. In 1963, artist Josef Albers, in Interaction of Color, extended that tradition into modern design. The field now known as color psychology, how specific colors reliably produce specific emotional responses even in people who have never encountered the tradition, traces its foundation back to Goethe.

When the reading assigns a color to what your body is doing, it is drawing on this long-standing shared language. The biometric data is modern. The knowledge is ancient.

The Photographs

Three photographs are taken at ten, twenty, and thirty seconds into the session. Each captures a different moment of your reading, which is why the colors may evolve across the three photos.

The dominant color of each photograph reflects your state at that instant. The brightness and saturation reflect how warm you are, since a warmer body reads as more energy being expressed outward, and the photos are more vivid. A cooler body reads as energy turned inward and the photos are more muted and atmospheric.

Each photograph may also show patches of additional colors around the edges. These accent colors are not ornamental; they reflect how your energy shifted during the session. If you started calm and became activated, an earlier color and a later color will both appear. If your energy held steady at a peak before settling, that peak color will appear as well. 

The more variety you see in the accent colors, the more your energy moved during the reading. The fewer accent colors, the steadier your state was.

The UNWAVERING RAY OF LIGHT

“His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.” Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Your energy is constantly changing, sometimes in little ways and sometimes dramatically. The unwavering ray of light is a visual representation of this journey.

Your reading begins at the left edge of the ray of light and moves to the right. Once the light passes the prism line, it bursts forth in color. The color at any point along the ray is what your aura was at that moment in the reading. The line's thickness and brightness change with your energy. Your ray is specific to your reading and could not be reproduced from anyone else's data.

If your energy was steady, the ray flows as a single dominant color. If your energy moved through several states, you would see distinct bands of color shift along its length. The line rises when your activation grew and softens downward when you settled. The glow around it spreads wider when you were warm and draws in close when you were cooler.

The ray is your aura measured in time. Read from left to right, it is a continuous portrait of your nervous system at work.

The AudioVISUAL JOURNEY

The audio tone is a short piece of music composed from your session data, paired with a fluid visualization that moves in time with it. This is the part of the reading with the deepest historical roots.

Where the audio comes from

In the sixth century BCE, Pythagoras discovered that the musical intervals we still use today, such as the octave, the fourth, the fifth, are simple mathematical ratios. A string twice as long sounds an octave lower. A string at a three-to-two ratio sounds a perfect fifth. For Pythagoras, these ratios were not a coincidence, they were evidence that music, mathematics, and the cosmos share the same underlying structure. He called this the music of the spheres (musica universalis), the idea that the celestial bodies move in ratios that produce an inaudible music.

Plato carried this idea forward, describing existence as tuned to Pythagorean intervals. The idea that the universe is musical in its construction became one of the central ideas in early Western philosophy.

In 168 CE, Ptolemy wrote about all three traditions our system draws on. In one book, Ptolemy laid out musical theory in Pythagorean ratios, assigned musical tones to the positions of the zodiac, and mapped the seven Greek musical modes onto the twelve zodiac signs. The same person who codified Western astrology as we know it today also wrote the oldest known system assigning tones and modes to the stars. Your reading's audio is a direct reflection of this.

Kepler extended the idea in 1619 in Harmonices Mundi, assigning specific musical intervals to the orbital speeds of each planet. Four hundred years later, much of modern physics still operates on the assumption that mathematical harmony is the underlying structure of the universe.

How your sonic signature is made

Your zodiac sign sets the root note of your piece, following the circle of fifths, which is itself a modern visualization of the same Pythagorean three-to-two ratio. 

Your aura color sets the musical mode, the emotional character of the scale. This mirrors Ptolemy's own assignment of modes to zodiac positions, adapted to the seven-color spectrum.

The motion of your energy during the session shapes how the piece unfolds. If your energy trended downward toward calm, the tone resolves in a grounding direction, returning home. If your energy trended upward toward activation, it resolves in an ascending direction, reaching outward. Moments of stability give the tone clarity. Moments of change bring in additional voices and harmonic color.

How the visualization is made

The visualization of the audio is a fluid field that blooms, warps, and drifts in time with the piece. The colors follow the same journey your energy took during the session, moving through the palette the way your ray of light does. Your body temperature shapes the feeling of the field, with warmer readings rendering more vivid and expansive, cooler readings rendering more muted.

The result is a short piece that exists only for your reading. No one else has your combination of zodiac, color, energetic path, temperature, and session character through those thirty seconds. This is your reading, made audible and visible.

The Readings

Two kinds of written readings accompany every session. The first are three readings that translate what each of your aura photographs represent — the meaning of your dominant color and the energy underneath it. The second explains how your music came together: the note set by your zodiac, the mode set by your aura color, and the meaning behind those connections.

Both kinds of readings were written by us specifically for this system. They draw on the same lineage that built the rest of the experience — the seven-color spectrum, the seven musical modes, the zodiac's tonal mapping. The data is yours. The translation is ours, written by hand for the system we built.

LIVE MUSIC SESSIONS

The same principles that power Your Aura Ray Journey also power our Live Music Sessions — a real-time interactive musical performance generated from your biometric data and zodiac sign. In a Live Music Session, you place your hands on the Aura Ray Instrument and the music begins. Your zodiac sets the root note, just as in Your Aura Ray Journey. Your skin's conductance and temperature shape the sounds as they unfold. A light sensor on the instrument responds to light and shadow, opening up another way for you to shape the music in real time. You don't just hear the result of your reading — you physically shape the music while it plays. Each performance exists only once, lasting about two minutes, with a complete recording emailed to you afterward.

What Makes Us Different

Aura photography has existed in various forms since the 1970s. Most systems give you a single photograph and a short interpretation. That kind of reading treats your aura as something to capture once and describe.

Our system treats your aura as something in motion — as a record across thirty seconds, and as a live experience you can shape with your hands. Three photographs show how your energy shifts across the session. The ray of light shows the path it travels. The audiovisual representation is a piece of music and video specific to this exact moment of your life. This is not a moment but a multilayered record, a journey made in space and in time, in color and in sound.

The system underneath is a synthesis. Most approaches to energy work borrow from one tradition. Our system draws on several that point to the same thing. Pythagorean mathematics and modern physics both say that ratios are the structure of reality. Ptolemy connected astronomy, astrology, and music together. Newton embedded the diatonic scale into the visible spectrum. Goethe and modern color psychology tell us those colors mean something to us emotionally. Today, modern physiology lets us read the body's autonomic state through a contact on your skin. Using all of this shared history and knowledge, we created our own framework to provide a translation of your energy through space and time. The result is something so special and unique that if every person who has ever lived on Earth sat down for a reading every second since the beginning of the universe, no two journeys would ever repeat. Your Aura Ray journey is not just unique to you, it is unique to you in this moment of time.

WhO WE ARE

Hey Aura Ray was built by two people who like to make things.

The technical system — the aura photographs, the ray of light image, the audiovisual journey, and the Aura Ray Instrument — was designed and built by Brian, who also created the philosophical framework that makes the experience so unique. Combining artistic expression with DIY technology has been a through-line in his creative work — most notably his music project Auroras Wave, which included an album created through a light-sensitive effect pedal built into a board game. He also performs for children as DJ SHHH! at libraries throughout Long Island.

The readings — the words that translate what your aura represents — were written by Jen, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School. Her writing has appeared in Slate and Tin House.

We are based in New York. We made this for the same reason we try making anything — to see if we could. The experience turned out to be something we wanted to share.