Experimental Music Project

The Experimental Music Project is a project that transforms numbers, sounds and images encountered in everyday life into music. Currently the artist has set up a complete system for numbers, letters and barcodes, and has transformed a whole year's worth of mobile phone verification codes he has collected into music. The artist is currently working on a system for transforming images into music.

The development of technology has triggered fundamental changes in the level of social connectivity. Digital technology connects the whole society into a whole, expands the boundary of the society, reorganizes the way of production organization, changes the state of daily life, improves the sharing and effectiveness of information transmission, and also brings the dependence of the convenience of human beings.

The artist uses common data in daily life as the media to bring them into different kinds of art. When the form changes, what do these numbers represent? Perhaps they have been stripped of the meaning given to them by society, perhaps they have lost the concept of primitive symbols. Between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, there is a state of uncertainty, and in this state of uncertainty, can reflect the current society.

The essence of experimental art is to carry out unprecedented exploration and attempts, and sublimate the thoughts and feelings acquired from life on the artistic level. The way experimental art is presented is unknown and uncertain. The state of experimental art can be ongoing or coming.

If I list six random numbers it is meaningless. But I list the winning numbers of the lottery, and those numbers become powerful and beautiful.

-Werk ohne Autor, film, 2018

What was the reason for starting the project?

On 12 November 2019, Gao Peng, the director of Today Art Museum, came to give a lecture in the school, and I was inspired by a remark he made. He said that art itself is meaningless, there is just a group of people who insist on making art, and their insistence makes art meaningful. According to what he called meaningless things are art, I started to try to do meaningless things and collect meaningless things. In the beginning I posted a work called 'Life Code' on my public social media, which is actually a collection of a series of jumbled numbers such as captcha codes, pick-up codes, courier numbers and so on. When I opened my phone's SMS software, it was all these verification code messages. There was no useful message beyond that. I was thinking great! These numbers, these captchas are meaningless when they are used up, they must be the art I was looking for. I've been focusing on numbers ever since.

How do you make digital relevant to music?

How do you make music with numbers?

-Build a system which is similar to a short score, where I define some symbols with numbers missing from the score. Make them all work in relation to each other in the score. This allows most forms of data to be used to make music.

The present time is a highly informative cyber age. The way of self-identification has changed in this age. It is an amazing experience. When you need to log into an app or a website you forget the password of the account that belongs to you. You can change the password and thus log in by tying it to your mobile number or email account. And the medium that makes it all work well is a series of numbers. It's like a key that verifies your identity and opens the door to this world (the internet world), and it's in this context that CAPTCHA was born. It is also the first work of the Experimental Music Project. The material for this work is all the numbers I receive in my life that are related to identity verification. These numbers include SMS codes, courier numbers, ticket order numbers and so on. These numbers not only verify my identity, but also represent my life. They are important to me, so I collected these numbers for a year and used them to complete my work.

In this piece I tried to make the audio more concrete by blending the way it is composed with images. I set the length of the notes based on a black and white square image to make the notes look like a certain image. These black and white squares are generated from binary numbers. At the same time I add an element of noise to the video composition, i.e. the computer collects sounds which make changes to the output image.

It is the sound that is based on the graphics and the sound that affects the graphics. That's why I call this transformation process uncertain conversion.

I have even tried to go over and translate these receipts, by way of music.

When I did that, I noticed the prices of the items. I slowly reacted to the fact that Tesco's meal deal seemed to have gone up in price, the price of Coke seemed to have gone up, the price of a cup of coffee seemed to have gone up. After that I started to understand the economy, I started to pay attention to the market, I started to pay attention to inflation. Because of the war between Russia and Ukraine, Europe started to run short of energy. The price of natural gas went through the roof. At the same time the UK was experiencing the worst inflation in 40 years. Faced with a tough economic form. These curves of economic data shocked me and I wanted to feel it, translate it through music and even perform it.

How to Perform Inflation

Make a score based on the curve of inflation, this score is just a trend. It does not indicate a clear pitch, and it is also not limited to what can be performed. It can be instrumental, singing, recitation, or even silence.

This work is one of my biggest regrets in the Experimental Music Project. I was not able to complete it for various reasons. Part of it is that I wanted to invite random passers-by to perform like this. The other part is that for the passers-by, there may not be an appropriate medium to express their understanding of the score. Even for some passers-by, such a score is so abstract that it is difficult for them to respond to it.

If I'm out of an environment like an art gallery, an art school. Doing something like this would become awkward and especially difficult at the same time.

Sound of Inflation, is my understanding of the curve of inflation.

I think about what inflation is and I think of it as a relationship. A relationship between demand and supply. And commodities are like a bridge between demand and supply. So I was looking for the voice of commodities and I found advertising. I reconstructed advertising based on inflation data. This is my understanding of the inflation curve.

The Cover of HeartRate Music

After that I started thinking about how to make an inflation in an art gallery. For this I needed to have a commodity, a currency, a demand, a supply, a purchase, a sale.

I commoditised my heart rate data - making music out of it. At MA SHOW I presented 100 CDs of music made from 100 days of my heart rate data. They vary in style and length. These 100 CDs are my commodity. At the same time I don't want to regulate this market in any way, I think it should be completely free. So I went about selling them with audience pricing.

In the end I sold 8 CDs and the imagined inflation didn't happen.

The Cover of Barcode Music

Process and results

In contemporary art making, for some artists the process may be more important as they are more concerned with the experience and exploration of the creative process. They may be less concerned with the final work and more concerned with the feelings and experiences of the creative process. Like most experimental music artists, who add a variety of different elements to their music in order to break away from traditional musical structures, their music may sound disorganized or even harsh. But there is no shortage of artists whose music sounds aesthetically pleasing and has a certain musicality. Perhaps for these artists, the outcome may be more important, and they may be more concerned with the sound and content of their work.

Before that I saw my music as a process-oriented composition. Like most experimental music artists, I didn't care what it sounded like, my focus was on my personal experience in the process. I previously favoured the process leading the outcome, rather than the process serving the outcome.

But after I came to the UK, my thoughts began to waver. The whole art market here is relatively complete compared to China. The public's aesthetic appreciation of art is higher than that in China. At that time, I thought that there was some development space for works that serve the visual sense. That's why I showed my first work in Chelsea - Uncertain Conversion. It was also an attempt to move from audio to video. I started to rethink which is more important to me, the process and the result. Which is more important to the audience. For the first time I included the audience in my thinking. The audience is definitely an important part of an exhibition. Their experience, their evaluation, can more or less reflect the good or bad of a piece of work. Of course, my work has changed a bit during this process. The changes I made at that time were a failure in the eyes of the present. Too much thinking started to make my work less pure. It broke the delicate balance of digital-verified identity-audio. I don't know where I should stand in talking about my work. But I guess it was an inevitable step for me, for the Experimental Music Project.

HeartRate Data

MA SHOW

Some visual experimentation

In the process of designing, my ideas kept changing. I couldn't find a visual language that satisfied me. It always feels like I can have them or not. These elements did not convince me strongly enough to include them in my work. So in the end I discarded the visual element. I see it as a work that shows the process completely. My concept, how I carried out the project, was more important than the visual elements. So upfront my focus has been on the build-up of the project, how to convert digital into music, what kind of transformation is interesting, successful, etc. For the visual thinking, I think the numbers themselves are strong enough to make some point.

Uncertain Conversion

Receipts

One thing that makes living in the UK very different from China is that you can ask for a receipt for everything you buy. In China you don't see receipts very often. I think receipts are a very interesting vehicle, it's kind of like a photo, it can record where you went, what you bought, what you ate and so on at a specific moment in time. I tried to work with receipts when I first started at Chelsea. This material is sensitive to heat sources. I tried to burn them so as to leave some traces, it was a bit like painting, but of course it was a very small experiment.

The Cover of CAPTCHA

Another Way to Verify Identity - Barcodes

Barcodes are another digital form of verifying the identity of an item. It abstracts a concrete item into a paragraph of barcodes and numbers. I think it is very interesting. It's like those authentication codes, order numbers, a series of numbers that represent "me", a journey, etc. I started experimenting with barcodes. Transforming these barcodes and numbers into musical notes. It seems more like how you can hear a graphic, a number, or even the item itself.