Drawing
the Music

Parin Heidari Ambidextrous artist & synesthete

A letter

Dear Mumford & Sons,

For the past fifteen years, your music has been a constant companion throughout my artistic journey.

As a synesthetic artist, I experience sound as visual movement. Certain songs become lines, rhythms become gestures, and emotions transform into shapes before they ever become drawings. Your music has inspired countless moments in my life and practice, often becoming the invisible soundtrack behind my work.

Over the years, I have developed a performance practice built on the continuous line, a single, uninterrupted mark, often drawn with both hands at once. The work exists somewhere between improvisation, movement, and listening.

After speaking with Ben on your Instagram live, I found myself imagining what it would be like to bring these worlds together, allowing an audience to witness, in real time, how your music transforms into visual form through my synesthetic experience.

This is not about illustrating songs. It is about a live dialogue between sound and line, where each performance becomes a unique and unrepeatable visual response to the music.

I would be honored to explore creating a live drawing performance alongside you.

Warmly,

Parin Heidari

The performance

Live synesthetic drawing

A single continuous line, drawn as the music plays. The audience watches one drawing emerge, breath by breath, in response to the sound in the room.

Live drawing, Surf City, NYC

Live drawing, LUME Studios, NYC

Created entirely in real time. Nothing prepared in advance.

A single continuous line. One unbroken gesture, start to finish.

Both hands at once. Mirroring the music's symmetry and movement.

Improvised, never illustrated. A response to the sound as it unfolds.

Witnessed live. The audience sees the artwork appear, not a finished result.

A unique artifact. Each drawing exists only because of that night.

How it could work

Possible formats

Think of it as a small menu rather than a fixed plan: a format, an optional treatment, at whatever scale feels right. Nothing here is fixed. They are starting points for a conversation.

The format How the audience sees it. Pick one.

A canvas, in full view

Live drawing on a large canvas the audience can see directly from the floor.

Overhead, projected behind the band

An overhead camera captures the page. The drawing appears on the screens behind you, at scale.

Digital, projected live

Drawn digitally and projected in real time. The most flexible to stage and light.

The treatment An optional layer over any format.

Glow in the dark

Drawn with UV-reactive ink so the line appears only in darkness, glowing into view as it is made.

Blind drawing

Drawing ambidextrously with my eyes closed, letting only the sound guide my hands. The most direct translation of music into line, made purely by listening.

A possible starting point

One song, drawn live and projected behind the band, building, if it feels right, toward a full set.

A single piece is the easiest place to begin and the truest way to find out what this could become.

Parin drawing the wall of one-line faces

“A line can carry emotion, absence, and memory, without explanation.”

From the artist statement

Why you

Fifteen years of quiet companionship

Your songs have scored the largest moments of my life and the smallest ones: the late nights in the studio, the long drives, the years where I was still finding my hand. The storytelling in your music has a particular shape. It builds, it breaks open, it gathers everyone in the room into the same breath.

There is something in the way your music swells and gives way that translates almost directly into line for me. The restraint before a chorus, the way a song opens up all at once. With your music, I don't have to translate it into images. The images are already there.

More than any other music, yours feels made to be witnessed in a room full of people. That is exactly where a live drawing belongs: made once, in front of everyone, and never repeated. Of all the artists whose work has shaped mine, yours is the one I most desire to work alongside.

Selected work