Audiovisual Composition: WANG Xinyu (China)

Interactive Design & Engineering: XUE Nianzhi (China)

Digital Percussion Solo: LIU Meng (China)

On January 3, 2019, the Chang’e-4 probe successfully landed in the Von Kármán crater within the South Pole–Aitken basin on the far side of the Moon, achieving the first-ever soft landing and scientific exploration of the lunar far side in human history. This piece, based on spectral data collected by the Chang’e-4 research team and published in Nature, leverages intelligent technologies to transform these unique natural science datasets into audiovisual interaction, audiovisual structure, and musical spatialization data. These transformed elements subsequently constitute the primary compositional material. The Chinese title Yue Yin of the piece is a homophone of “musical tone” in Chinese, symbolically evoking the concept of “lunar tones” through the expressive medium of technology-based art.

Composer: Wyatt Cannon (USA)

Technical Collaborators and Performers: Wyatt Cannon, YE Xiaolan (China), WANG Yicheng (China)

(Commissioned Composition by the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Processing Technology for Digital Music, Ministry of Culture and Tourism)

The Astral Body uses magic as a metaphor for the invisible systems that shape our world. Through gesture-controlled sound synthesis, three performers appear to conjure sound from thin air, transforming movement into music. The piece focuses on adversarial relationships, inviting us to contemplate how these push us to grow and create complexity against the universe’s constant trend toward uniformity.The piece uses SuperCollider for synthesis and MediaPipe for real-time gesture recognition. A neural network is used to generate some of the sounds, combining samples of real-world sounds with synthesized ones. The result is otherworldly, embodying the liminal space between divine and human. Rather than framing AI as a threat, Cannon uses it to suggest a more collaborative relationship with technology—one where tension becomes a source of creativity, and where magic emerges from code.

Composer/Performer: ZHUANG Xiaoni (China)

The work adopts Samplecloud and Sineofwave as the main sound design techniques, and all sounds come from original piano works with motion sampling. The F1 is unfolded, and the main fabric layout is formed using extremely fast and slow methods. The sound synthesis part attempts various combinations of sound quality, duration, pitch, sound image, etc. in a linear gradient manner to transform and align multiple parts. The structural design of the work is gradually increased from simple to complex and from musical sound to noise. The piano symbolizes traditional cultural symbols in the work, and its electronic transformation metaphorically represents the opposition, struggle, and exploration in the integration of traditional humanities and digital tools in the context of the technological era. In the interactive performance, the gesture control is designed as a pianist's finger playing technique, and multiple sets of palm movements are mapped with music data. The dynamic design of the screen extracts values from the music effects, and the gesture performance plot follows the music structure, developing from freedom to disorder and ultimately having rules.

Composer/Live Electronics: REN Shihong (China)

Performer: TANG Siqi (China)

Sound Spatialization Design: YE Zeshaoen (China)

(Commissioned Composition by the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Processing Technology for Digital Music, Ministry of Culture and Tourism)

The human voice can generally be simplified as a combination of white noise, pulse waves, and filter banks. This work attempts to base itself on these modules and utilize artificial intelligence technology to analyze timbral characteristics, exploring non-semantic artistic expression of the human voice in dialogue with electronic music.

Composer/Performer: Kevin Kailun Zhang (USA)

This performance presents an improvisation for piano enhanced by a wrist-based augmentation device. At its foundation is an acoustic piano, outfitted with a vibration pickup and soundboard-mounted transducers. Instead of projecting sound through external speakers, the system feeds the processed signal back into the body of the piano itself, allowing the instrument to resonate with its own transformed voice. The performer wears a custom wristband equipped with motion sensors, where simple gestures—such as a hand tilt or a twist of the wrist—dynamically shape delay feedback and timing in real time.

Composer/Performer: WAN Fang (China)

Visual Design: ZENG Ziqiao (China)

(Commissioned Composition by the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Processing Technology for Digital Music, Ministry of Culture and Tourism)

Blossoming Shadows is an interactive audiovisual electronic music composition that draws inspiration from the Zen Buddhist concept of “a flower in hand, a smile unfolds”. Through the medium of the hand, the piece merges motion recognition with AI-generated visuals to explore the relationship between body, algorithm, and civilizational memory. As hand shadows glide through space, ephemeral digital illusions emerge in response—images born from intention, gestures, and thought. Here, AI is not a mere tool, but a perceptive collaborator. Together, human and machine engage in a choreographed dialogue, where ancient symbols find renewed form through contemporary algorithmic logic.In this meditative interplay of light and movement, Blossoming Shadows evokes an Eastern aesthetic of transformation where presence gives rise to vision, and the immaterial becomes visible. It is a dance of perception, a co-creation of past and future, tradition and technology.

Composer/Performer: LIN Shuyu (China)

The Wei's Pipa in Ming Dynasty is different from the modern pipa that we hear today, not only in size but also in sound. The composer experiments to combine this historical instrument with modern electronic music by using two points: the original sample and Samplers Library.For sound material, the composer recorded Wei's Pipa in Ming Dynasty restored by Qi Mingjing, a professor at the School of Music of Huzhou University. She restored the instruments--the Wei's Pipa in Ming Dynasty by translating Weishi Yuepu ( 魏氏乐谱 , "Master Wei's music scores"). The composer deconstructed the sound materials and built a fantasy sound world.For the Samplers Library, Qi Mingjing and her group made Pipa1617, a free Samplers recorded by the restored Ming Dynasty Pipa. The composer uses an iPhone as a data-driven instrument, combining the Sampler and algorithmic polyphonic synth, interpreting the Pipa innovatively. Instead of playing morden Pipa, the composer plays the Ming Pipa on stage.

Composer/Performer: Hsuan Chang Kitano (USA)

The Tide can be internal or external—a silent breath, an emotional state, or the natural movement of the ocean. Momentary yet powerful, it washes away dark thoughts, offering a wish to cleanse the shore and begin again on a clearer path. Many of the sounds in this piece are drawn from field recordings made at the beach and ocean, as well as from everyday moments in the kitchen and bathroom at home. While surrounded by the hum of domestic life, my thoughts drift seaward—this piece is born from that quiet yearning. Some sound materials emerge from objects gathered during a beach cleanup event in Yilan in July 2025—fragments of plastic, bits of metal, and discarded debris, once silent, now transformed into instruments of resonance. These remnants—washed ashore by the tide and lifted by human hands—carry stories of both neglect and care. In their revoicing, The Tide becomes both a meditation and a quiet reckoning, where personal longing drifts into environmental awareness, and the sea gently speaks back what we leave behind.

Composer: DUAN Ruilei (China)

Guqin: ZHOU Hengcheng (China)

Programming: MA Zhengyang (China) DUAN Ruilei

“A Thousand Listenings” is an interactive sound installation that contemplates the dialogue between ancient Eastern resonance and modern digital collective consciousness. At the heart of the piece lies the solitary tremor of a guqin string—an inquiry from history, a primordial frequency emanating from the depths of civilization. Its sound is captured, deconstructed by algorithms, and reanimated with an electronic pulse. In response, a constellation of smartphones in the audience awakens, weaving a continually evolving, immersive soundscape—an acoustic landscape that grows in real-time. This is not merely a performance but an aural ritual spanning millennia, where the ancient breath of the guqin meets the distributed, networked consciousness of the present, facilitated by every participant's device.