Jess+

Craig Vear

Pipa: Luoran

Erhu: Zhang Yanzhuoya罗然（琵琶）、张妍卓雅（二胡）

Jess+ (or more accurately Shen+) is an intelligent Digital Score as a creative platform for inclusive music-making for disabled and non-disabled musicians. This score has been developed to extend the creativity of disabled and non-disabled musicians within an inclusive music ensemble. The digital score uses AI and a robotic arm to bind these musicians in a shared creative improvisation with all the musicians benefiting, practices enhanced and relationships transformed. It deals with the research question: "How to build an embodied-AI system that facilitates co-creation for an improvising ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians, so that the expressive qualities of all musicians are amplified and bound together in a co-creative system?" For more info visit https://digiscore.github.io/pages/Impact_case_study_Jess_Plus/

Inarticulate

Xiao Xiang

Sample input & Score Instrument: Xiao Xiang

Zheng: Zhi Hui

Synthesizer: Zuo Moqi

Gesture Sensor: Jiang Yao

paper & portfolio of six browser-native works, 2025

A low-code manifesto for networked performance: P5.js graphics, Node.js servers and socket.io push turn any phone into a living score. Five one-minute etudes—orbiting bodies, Lissajous rhythms, random glyphs, webcam hand-pose ML, Beijing–Wuhan bianzhong/gamelan latency test—feed the larger installations Touch Modular(mobile voltages driving a Euro-rack) and Inarticulate (AI-audio score instrument projected for all). Rehearsal becomes co-design: players decide how arcs, grains or plasma maps sound, then watch tactics mutate when the same URL is opened in Seoul, Paris or Lagos. The promise: composers who can drag a circle in JavaScript can now conduct the globe.

A Lake Within a Lake

Zihan, Cat Hope

Zheng: Zhihui

for guzheng + spatialised electronics, 2025

This work is based on the poem ‘A Lake Within a Lake’ by Australian Indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonucal, written in Hangzhou, China in September 1984. The poem is a reflection on Xi (west) lake in Hangzhou, but also a reflection of Noonucal’s own Aboriginal heritage and connection to the land, and the interconnectedness of different spaces and perspectives. This work proposes interconnectedness is what we need in this troubled world, and how the landscape can provide that connection. Like the poem, the piece has three main sections, three ‘sonic’ pools in the lake of spatialisation. The score derives images from a guzheng instrument gifted to Mindy Meng Wang by her first teacher; a segment of which is provided at the start of the score as a ’meditation’ for the performer. Guzheng parts in the electroic track are performed by Mindy Meng Wang.

Line Drawings

Andrea Agostini

Banhu: Yu Hongfei

Zhonghu: Zeng Yujie

Erhu: Huang Yushan

Gaohu: Ma yixin

five real-time studies for 4 Chinese strings + 8-ch electronics, 12’

A hidden MIDI-fader “conductor” feeds back with the players: Max-generated scores scroll on individual tablets, continuously rewriting glissandi, filtered-noise bands, beating double-stops or scalar flurries in response to what is heard. The result is a set of living line diagrams—gestural, microtonal, polyrhythmic—whose ink is refreshed every second, turning sight-reading into a collective, ever-adjusting cognition loop.

Tenor2026 Announcement

Elisabeth Schimana

Pale Dot

Zhao Yixuan

Engineer: Sam Tarakajian

Dizi&Xiao: Wang Pinyu

"Pale Dot" is a live electronic music inspired by a cosmic perspective, named after Carl Sagan's concept of the "Pale Blue Dot". By interweaving different sections of a sound map with the Chinese bamboo flute and Xiao, the work creates an ever-changing, profound soundscape, conveying the poetic vastness of the universe.

The work is divided into five stages: Glimpse-Repulsion-Symbiosis-Transcendence-Introspection. Through the fleeting nuances of bamboo flute, Xiao timbres and the experimental structure of electronic sounds, high and low frequencies intertwine, oscillating and resonating together, weaving a grand and delicate sonic universe. Each stage explores the boundaries of existence and meaning through pulsation and breath.

134 different audio samples were selected to structure a 2D sound map to guide the live performance, including various bamboo flute and Xiao timbers, as well as synthesizer sounds with glitch-like characteristics, presenting the effect of a digital score in a creative performance. The performer plays the instrument and the motion sensor simultaneously, achieving real-time interaction with the sound map.

Artist Bio

ZHAO Yixuan （Composer & Interaction designer）

ZHAO Yixuan is a composer, a lecturer at the Electronic Music Center, Department of Music AI and Music Information Technology, Central Conservatory of Music, China, and a visiting researcher at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK. She worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Central Conservatory of Music.

She has been dedicated to exploring the practice of digital audio and artificial intelligence in music composition and collaborating with performers to search for more possibilities in technological performance environments. Her composition span interactive music, electroacoustic music, contemporary music, and new media art. Her works have won numerous awards and performed in many international conferences and concerts, including NIME, ICMC, Ars Electronica, Summit on Music Intelligence, Journées d'Informatique Musicale, TiMP, IRCAM Forum, China-UK International Music Festival, Nottingham New Music Festival, MUSICACOUSTICA-BEIJING, Beijing Youth Arts Festival, WOCMAT Taiwan, among others.

Sam Tarakajian （Engineer）

Sam is a Brooklyn based developer and creative coder. After completing his studies in computer science at Brown University in 2010, he joined Cycling ’74. While there he’s worked on Mira, an app for tactile control of a Max patch, Node for Max, a utility for controlling Node processes from a Max patch, and RNBO, a code generation and export tool. Chances are, you might have heard Sam’s voice and wisdom in one of his “Delicious Max Tutorial” videos, played around with his Rhythm Necklace iOS app, or made rhythms using Nestup, his domain-specific language for musical rhythms.

Shared Moment: Moon Reflections

Zhang Yuan

AI Engineer: Zhang Xinran

Pipa: Yu Yuanchun

DISTRIBUTED PERFORMANCE OF

LES SON VISIONNAIRES BY HELMUT W. ERDMANN

Georg Hajdu

Zheng: Wu Yanxiao

Banhu: Yu Hongfei

Dizi: Zhou Yiming

Percussion: Yang Zhiyao

Composer-networker | Hamburg

Molecular biologist turned computer-music trailblazer. Author of Quintet.net for globe-spanning realtime performance and MaxScore, the notation layer of Max/MSP. Professor of Multimedia Composition, HfMT Hamburg; founder, Ligeti Zentrum.Scores and interactive systems integrate microtonality, live visuals and net-cast ensembles, shown at IRCAM, ICMC, SIGGRAPH, ZKM and beyond.

Les Son Visionnaires– Helmut W. Erdmann, realised by Georg Hajdu & class (DE) for flute, banhu, guzheng, percussion + networked tablets, 2020/25

Erdmann’s pandemic-era manuscript is sliced into 68 clickable SVG tiles—magenta violin, blue cello, green bass, orange drums, black tutti—each hosting a roaming cursor or a student-composed sound file. Over a local 5 GHz web or a wide-area link to Hamburg, conductor, performers or even audience tap tiles: cursors glide, loops fire, pages jump, forging a non-linear, collective dramaturgy on the fly. The score becomes instrument; the tablet becomes score: a 12-minute lesson in contemporary musicianship for any age, any latitude.