Yanru Zhu | Confluence of Melody: Recontextualization of Offline and Online Public Music Activities

 
Entering Fuxing Park at seven in the morning you will hear the sound of multiple instruments mixing together. Going closer to a long and narrow trail in the southern part of the park, over 15 saxophone players are practicing a mix of 1980s pop and communist revolutionary music. The public spaces music activity typically happens in parks and pedestrian walkways in the city, and Fuxing Park is a typical representation of the activity.

Besides the onsite music activities, the emergence of online live streaming platforms incentivizes the online public music activities. Apps like TikTok or Kuaishou, hosts live streaming music performances that allow intense interactions with the audience. The platforms construct a virtual park for the audience to wander around and listen to various musical performances.

Confluence of Melody is a site-specific sound installation that links offline music with the virtual soundscape. Onsite public music recordings were collected from parks and open spaces in Shanghai, these are combined with recordings of virtual live streaming performances which were collected from multiple hosts in TikTok.

The physical installation consists of a park bench and seven speakers placed along a walking trail. The audience is invited to walk around the trail or sit on the park bench to listen to sounds generated from different speakers hung throughout the space. The speakers are similar to the one park musicians often use. The speakers, path, and bench recreate the environment of a public music park.

The project imagines that every source of sound forms a river, which runs and splashes into each other. The audience can walk into the confluence and feel the different stories and emotions embedded in the river.