This concert was streamed by LIVE@jacobs on April 26, 2026. We would like to thank Tony Tadey for operating the cameras, encoding the stream, and providing technical advice. Ben Wesenberg led the team of students who mixed our 8-channel live sound to stereo for the stream.
Mechanical Daily is a sound performance that finds music in the rhythms of everyday life. The piece features custom-built machines — using solenoids and servo motors — that strike ordinary objects like wine glasses, glass cups, dry pasta, and wooden boxes. These industrial tools transform simple household items into a unique mechanical percussion ensemble.
Alongside the live striking, the fixed media (pre-recorded sound) features a collection of noises from my own home: the bubbles in a kitchen sink, a flushing toilet, the sound of doors opening and closing, and even my cat’s voice when she is hungry.
By mixing these cold, mechanical hits with warm, familiar home sounds, the work blurs the line between “noise” and “music.” It invites us to listen closely to our repetitive routines and discover the hidden joy in the small, mechanical moments of every day.
This work is inspired by the sound of bubbles. Bursting, floating, flowing, and sinking are turned into sound, creating a playful and shifting sonic world. Through a 7-channel setup, the piece offers an experience of bubbles swirling around and enveloping the space.
Ever since I became interested in electronic music, I was fascinated with the complexity and power of analog synthesizers. Though analog synths can often be difficult to navigate, their unpredictability is part of what makes them so compelling. Electrometric Dissonance combines digital and modular synthesizers to create metric dissonance and overlapping rhythmic patterns that produce shifting, complex textures. This piece was intended as a way to challenge myself to dive into the world of analog synthesis and the infinite possibilities it offers.
As I near the end of my time at IU, I can’t help but look back fondly on all the amazing experiences I had here. I tried to capture the bittersweet feeling I have about leaving this place. I used several techniques evocative of memory for this piece. One is FM bells, which were a staple of electronic music in the 1970s and 1980s. I also used a recording of snow fall that is reminiscent of dust on a vinyl record. A RAVE AI model generates percussion noises from the snow. I love this because in a way, the neural network can be thought of as remembering its training data every time it synthesizes sound. This is similar to the way our memories become a part of who we are. Thank you so much to Sean Smith for lending his elegant violin playing to this piece.
In this piece, I wanted to explore the pulse sounds and rhythms behind two very different materials: wood and metal. Despite their contrasting sound qualities, I wanted to see if I could integrate them into a single musical structure. What connects these two materials are their common features — the “pulses” they create at various tempos.
This idea originated from the Eccojam Project, where we were required to use only one short sound file and process it using only a delay effect. I recorded a very short sound of hitting my Stanley tumbler against a chair and experimented with it using a Spectral Delay Max patch. I discovered that by automating the frequency, feedback, and delay time, I could create interesting, pulse-like sounds. A few months later, I applied the same process to wooden sounds. I recorded a wooden toy guiro and created various pulse files at different tempos to complete the piece.
What process gave birth to life? Is entropy a necessary ingredient? DNA Sequencers explores the theory of DNA evolution, where molecules capable of repeating themselves start to take over chaotic random soups of organic chemicals. I search for the line between pattern and chaos, using synth sequencer patches to interpolate random note patterns into ordered sequences. Every element flows from more noisy to more clean until the harmonic cloud turns into recognizable music.
Part musical, part play, part absurd social commentary — this work is divided into two movements and features two characters: a mad inventor and a semi-organic AI entity with a fragmented soul. In the first movement, the inventor employs a series of extended piano techniques and absurdist theatrical gestures in coordination with fixed media played from a computer. In the second, the AI entity emerges through Neutone Morpho, a real-time processing plugin that transforms the mezzo-soprano’s live improvisation. Together, these dramaturgical choices converge on a single, central question: where does the boundary between the human and the machine lie — and as thinkers, should we conform to convention, or dare to cross it?
Stay is a live electronic piece centered on the ecological theme of the fragile relationship between animals and their changing environments, featuring hand shadow puppet performance that creates impressions of different animals such as bird, peacock, swan, wolf, deer, and others.
The work uses MediaPipe for real-time hand motion capture, including both gesture recognition and tracking of coordination data. The movements not only create the shadow images but also interact directly with the sound. The visual component also incorporates AI-generated video segments, which contribute to the work’s environmental imagery.
Stay does not present a fixed narrative. Instead, it unfolds as a series of moments: arrival, stillness, and loss. The title can be heard as a request or as something increasingly impossible. As the environment shifts, the idea of “staying” becomes uncertain.
This piece was created using a series of interactive programs I wrote that simulate simplified versions of wind, magnetism, and gravitational forces. Using this data, I controlled a series of Max/MSP patches that splice and play back samples in a variety of ways. Combined with additional patches that create a glitch-heavy vocoder for speech samples, the result is a wash of sounds that ebb and flow with naturalistic patterns.
Eazin is created using the ROLI Seaboard and Airwave in Ableton Live, allowing continuous control over pitch, timbre, and gesture. Also, Eazin is the name of the spaceship’s captain, and in a journey defined by uncertainty, he is the one who maintains direction.
Eazin believes the world is absurd. There is no guaranteed meaning, no promised destination. And yet, he chooses to move forward, even if the endless stars make that hope seem impossibly small, even if one day he has to walk alone. But, it’s so lucky to have other friends.
Inspired by The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, this work reflects a philosophy of endurance in which fulfillment arises not from external success, but from an inner alignment with one’s labor. In this vision, dignity resides in the act itself rather than its outcome — meaning is carried beneath the surface.
Like Santiago’s journey into the open sea, the path of harpsichord practice — from Asia to the United States and Europe — has been shaped by distance, discipline, and an inward sense of purpose. The harpsichord becomes both protagonist and vessel: an instrument that carries history while undergoing transformation.
All sonic materials originate from recorded harpsichord sounds. The work also incorporates marine recordings — false killer whales, sperm whales, pantropical spotted dolphins, spinner dolphins, and bottlenose dolphins — integrated through a custom-built FSR (force-sensitive resistor) interface, courtesy of the Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation. “Miaoli – Sciaenidae Fish” recordings are provided by the Marine Ecoacoustics and Informatics Lab, Academia Sinica. All materials are used with permission.
Breath in White Space depicts a man walking alone in the open space after the snow. It was so quiet that there was almost no sound, and I could only hear my own breathing. Occasionally, there was the sound of the flute in the distance, fluttering like the wind, which made people unable to tell whether it was real or an echo in the mind. In this white space, the sound and imagination are gradually intertwined, and even breathing becomes uncertain.
Tourist Trapped is a programmatic work for bass trombone, fixed media, and live audio processing. The piece explores the experience of walking through a bustling plaza in an unfamiliar city where the sounds and scents of each storefront beckon the passerby.
