Se la mia morte brami | If You Desire My Death

🔗 https://wondermadrigale.netlify.app/

THE CONCEPT

I have always thought of the madrigal as one of the most fascinating forms of Renaissance music, but also one of the most difficult to approach on a first listen. For this reason, I wanted to create an experience that would help people enter Se la mia morte brami by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa, without simplifying it, but instead guiding the listening.

I synchronized the text line by line, in both Italian and English, while individual words appear in time with the music. In this way, it becomes easier to follow the intertwining voices and to perceive how text and polyphony support each other.

At the end of each stanza, a sound-reactive surface reveals only a few selected words from the text — few, but the ones that carry its emotional core: brami, morte, crudel. These words respond to the music and seem to come alive, emphasizing the moments of greatest intensity. For this surface, I used a soft gradient shader generated in Wonder, creating a luminous, atmospheric background that gently shifts as the words appear.

Inside the altarpiece, Gesualdo himself is also present. If you like, try to find him.

THE PROCESS

The entire design was created in Wonder. I began by providing reference images and describing what I envisioned: Wonder generated the full structure of the project, from layout and visual style to color palette, typography, the different sections of the experience, and both desktop/mobile and Italian/English versions.

I then connected Wonder to Claude Code through MCP, allowing me to continue developing the project directly on the generated code, reading and editing files in real time.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH WONDER

One of the things that impressed me most was working with Wonder purely through natural language. I wrote all my prompts in Italian, exactly as I would explain the idea to a person, without adapting my way of speaking to “talk to an AI”. Wonder understood every request precisely, and the experience felt surprisingly natural.

For the best experience, I recommend listening to the madrigal with headphones.

🔗 https://wondermadrigale.netlify.app/

My submission for the Wonder Challenge is live ✨

I created my personal portfolio website with Wonder — from prompt-based design exploration to a complete Marmel portfolio experience.

Wonder helped me build the design foundation quickly, Claude helped bring it into code.

Live portfolio: Web site live

Wonder project: https://app.wonder.so/mara-melkonyan/files/019f1da4-b75f-7486-856a-181471ba5994

Don’t forget to leave me a message in the Playground section. I’d love to read it.

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