When The Self of Us Becomes Ours premiered at the TENOR 2025 conference in Beijing. Wu Siyao, Zhang Yanzhuoya at Erhus, and Yang Manting, Huang Yushan at Zhonghus played the version for two Erhus and two Zhonghus. The conference took place at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing on October 25, 2025. The concert was curated and organized by Zhang Yuan and Li Yunpeng.
In this version, only three attendees registered as co-creators, but 5 of the attendees filled out the post-concert survey
The three registered co-creators were:
85, Xiao;
121, Zijun;
55, PT;
3829 evaluations were recorded during the performance. 55 attendees participated in the game with an assigned pattern-bot by the Web server.
Project description
When The Self of Us Becomes Ours is a work for four String instruments, live notation, live generative system, live electronics, and attendees’ participation. When The Self of We Becomes Ours is a Collaborative and interactive work in which the work is real-time created by the self-evaluation of the work. Attendees will evaluate the work through a web app, and the musical generative system will adjust in real-time according to their evaluations. The Musicians will receive notes via a live notation system on their mobile phones. The title of the works refers to the circular loop created between the attendees, the musical generative system, and their interconnection. This work belongs to a series of works in which the composer creates a self-referential musical generative system based on the real-time evaluation of the work. The main musical material of this work is its evaluation. The work duration is about 10 minutes. The title of the work refers to the embodiment that the participation in this event creates between the attendees when they collaborate to create something.
This work is a creative hybrid networked framework that integrates the musical generative system and its evaluation. The attendees, the generative system, and the musicians integrate, a hybrid networked creative system. This work is at the same time a musical and a social experiment. The data from the evaluations of the attendees will be recorded, processed, and shared as Open Data. Live notation is not improvisation; the musicians are expected to play with the most much precision as the events that they will receive on their mobile phones.
When the Self of Us Becomes Ours as an aesthetic-social experiment
From the perspective of a social-aesthetic experiment, this work researches three different aspects. First, we want to know if the same cooperative patterns are repeating in the various realizations of the work, or if, in each realization, the evaluation of the attendees is completely different.
Second, we want to know if participation in the evaluation itself generates a new way of listening and engagement in the listening of the work. Do we listen in the same way when we are creating the work by changing the work by its very own evaluation? How does participation in the real-time assessment of the work influence listening to the work?
Third, is there something like a collective listening embodiment? Can we say that the attendees work as a collective embodied sensory system, or do they act individually?
The attendees will fill out a survey after the performance
Description of the project
The form and narrative of the work is the history of its evaluation. The formal development of the materials is not given a priori; it depends on the real-time evaluation of the attendees. The work is conceived as a loop between the generative system and the attendees.
Fig. 1. circular self-referential generative system scheme.
This Work is a circular self-referential musical cooperative game. The attendees connect to a Wi-Fi network and then to a web server. They will interact with the system through a web page where they will evaluate the sounding result every 30 seconds. The generative system will react to the evaluations. If the evaluations are positive, the system will not change. If the evaluations are negative, the system will change, and the sounding result will change.
Fig.2 This is the web application that the attendees will use to evaluate the work.
The generative system of the work consists of a series of pattern bots (each one implemented as an autonomous bot) that repeat at different times. Each time a pattern begins its cycle, it measures its relative position (phase)regarding the other patterns and determines the values of the parameters of the events belonging to this pattern.
Every 30 seconds, the attendees evaluate the evolution of the work; they will select 5 if they like it or 1 if they do not like it. This evaluation will change the velocity or repetition of their associated pattern-bot. This change will create a change in the work.
Some of the pattern-bots will control the instruments by sending them via a real-time notation system the notes to be played by the musicians via a real-time notation system.
Other Agents will control the live electronic synthesis motor generation of the electronic sounds.
Fig. 3. This is the application used by the interpreters to receive the notes to be played. The musician will receive the exact note to be played.
The notes created by the other pattern bots will be used as data creators that will interact with other pattern bots. This generative system is implemented in Max/Msp. The web server sends the evaluation data to the patch via OSC messages. Then the Max patch processes the information and sends OSC messages to the mobile phones of the musicians.
The generative system has been designed as a continuous process in which any of the elements is more important. This continuous process does not work as a traditional tensioning based on the properties of materials, but as a set of pattern layers that superpose, generating cognitive tensioning depending on the interpretation of the superposition of the different pattern layers. The engagement of the listener to the work does not depend on the properties of the materials, the form, or the densities of materials that are more or less equal during the work, but on the cognitive stress generated by the shifting patterns. So the final tensioning of the work depends on the interpretation of the superposition of the different pattern layers. This work belongs to a series of works that share in common the integration of the evaluation in the creative framework. In each one of the works, a different relationship between the number of types of musicians and how the evaluation changes the generative algorithm is explored. This Generative algorithm has been published in papers. The reference is omitted for anonymization.
iPad connected to the web server, Android mobile devices receive notes via live notation, the laptop with the Max patch, and the virtual machine with the Ubuntu Web Server.
Fernando Egido 