Shìshēng · As Sound Splashes is a participatory performance where thousands of participants collectively generate a living score through voice, gesture and space. Beginning from what I call a “blank score”, the work transforms audience sound into evolving visual strokes and musical structures in real time.

Inspired by the logic of Chinese calligraphy, where writing emerges from a small set of fundamental brush movements, the project explores how gesture can become a shared grammar for sound. Rather than focusing on characters themselves, the work looks at the basic movements of the brush before they become language. These strokes can be understood as simple gestures — directions of force — forming a kind of human movement grammar.

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dot → impulse
horizontal → sustained movement
vertical → gravity
sweep → release
press → expansion

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Instead of symbol → meaning, the logic becomes gesture → form. In this sense the brush movements suggest a morphology of sound — a way of describing how sonic forms emerge through gesture. In performance, this structure shifts into what I think of as a sonic grammar, gradually forming an acoustic environment inhabited by everyone present.

To translate collective sound into visual strokes, a system of directional shotgun microphones captures fragments of audience voices and environmental sound. These signals are analysed in real time through parameters such as frequency, amplitude and timbre, generating stroke-like marks on a projected score. In this way, sound itself becomes a form of writing. At the same time, the audience hears both the acoustic environment of the room and the system-generated sound produced from their own collective activity.

The work was presented at the V&A Museum in London during the Friday Late event To Ebb is To Flow, within a 600m² gallery space with a 15-metre ceiling. Over the course of the evening more than 1000 visitors became active participants, forming a shared sound field.

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Rather than being read as notation, the projected score functions as a symbolic archive of the moment. Marks appear, dissolve and re-emerge as sound unfolds, leaving traces similar to ink vibrations or the residue of breath.

Guzheng, electronics and Chinese percussion respond to this evolving field, interacting with the audience and the acoustic architecture of the space.

Through voice, breath, strokes and sound, audience and performers write the score together in real time. Responding to the room and to one another, language gradually dissolves. Sound becomes a shared script.

In this sense the work also touches on questions of auditory politics. Technology here functions as a mediator between human bodies and the acoustic environment: voices, breaths and gestures are translated into evolving sonic and visual forms. The audience inhabits this shared sound field, exploring listening as a space of human presence, agency and collective experience.