Everyone should create in their own way.
— Shiuan Chang
People Concerto
A composed theater and large-scale interactive sound installation
People Concerto is a performance work that joins composed theater to a real-time, large-scale interactive sound installation, brought into being through the presence, movement, and collective performance of its audience.
The work takes forest ecosystems as its model, where birdsong, wind, water, and insects assemble into an evolving, self-organized soundscape. Nobody in the room conducts it, and nobody reads from a page.. From that image it asks how human movement, technology, and AI-driven sound design might generate musical structure that emerges rather than being dictated. The boundary between stage and audience dissolves, and each visitor stands at once as author, performer, observer, and collaborator.
The piece turns architectural space into an instrument. Yuanyuan Ma's sixty-three fabric cells cover the floor, infrared cameras read the room from above, and an AI system developed with Quanta Research Institute translates the collective behavior of everyone present into sound as it unfolds. Within the cells lie recorded vocal layers from Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and instrumental passages from Ictus Ensemble, and what is heard is decided entirely by how the space is walked: the order in which cells are entered, the distance between a body and the dancer, the stillness or motion of each person, and beneath all of it a hidden layer of arrangement composed by Shiuan Chang. The governing logic stays fixed while the result never repeats, so that each session sounds once and once only, shaped by whoever happens to be in the room that evening. Dancer I-ling Liu moves among them, folding and unfolding the space, while live playing from Ictus Ensemble and sheng soloist Li-chin Li runs through the field of AI-generated sound.
No one is told they are performing. Yet as people begin to feel that their own movement is making the sound, they go looking for whoever must be in charge of it, wanting to be placed, wanting to be arranged. The work gives its authorship away, and in that giving it lays bare how hard we reach for a center, how reluctant we are to believe the sound could belong to us. What is horizontal underfoot rises vertical in perception, a space built at the scale of a single body, where the sound each of us hesitates to claim turns out to have been ours all along.
Project Vision
To create an ever-evolving multidisciplinary work and interconnected infrastructures where people become the generators of sound: not just as performers, but as agents of perception, shaping sonic worlds through their presence, movement, and collective intention.
Concept | Shiuan & Yuan
Artistic Director | Shiuan Chang
Music Composition & Sound Design | Shiuan Chang
Installation | Yuanyuan Ma
Dramaturgy | Wo-Yao Hung
Audio & Sound Engineering | Shao-Ting Sun
Recording Engineering | Shao-Ting Sun
Lighting Design | Ray Zheng
International New Music Ensemble Collaborative Recording | Ictus Ensemble
International Collaborative Recording | Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart
Performing Musicians | Ictus Ensemble
Choreographer | Liu I-Ling
Production Manager | Eason Cheng
Production Manager | Ying-Lu Wang
Stage Manager | Nick YuChen Hung
Co-Production | WeiWuYing Performing Center of the Arts
Work-In-Progress Supporting Venue | National Taichung Theater
Co-developer: Quanta Research Institute
Technical Support: Quanta Research Institute
Composition Commission Sponsorship | MUZIK 3 Foundation
Sound & Audio Engineering Sponsorship | Jessica Chu & Hendrick Lee
Consultant | Huey-Mei Lee, Yong-Feng Chung Divooe Zein
Premiere
Date: April 10–12, 2026 at Weiwuying International Music Festival
Venue: National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying)