News & Amusement
A live-coded audiovisual performance where the evening news dissolves into spectacle
一场实时编码视听演出，让新闻联播的庄重溶解为娱乐的景观
Built around CCTV's "Xinwen Lianbo," the performance opens with a montage of its iconic title sequences across the decades — then asks what happens to news, the most authoritative of media, in an age where we are amusing ourselves to death.
演出以央视《新闻联播》为母题，从跨越数十年的片头蒙太奇开场—— 进而追问：在一个"娱乐至死"的时代，新闻这种最具权威性的媒介将走向何方。
Overview
News & Amusement moves through pivotal chapters of China's transformation: from the Cultural Revolution, when individual destinies were absorbed into a collective narrative, to the One-Child Policy era, when national directives reached into the regulation of the family itself. As the performance unfolds, the camera's focus narrows onto the audience in the contemporary digital age — no longer witnesses of history, but active participants shaping the news.
The piece critically explores the shifting subjectivity of news narration while engaging the postmodern condition that turns even serious matters into entertainment. The gravitas of the broadcast blends seamlessly into spectacle: samples from "Xinwen Lianbo" are remixed with the pop melody "Ba Fang Lai Cai," while Hydra visuals — combined with p5.js — fold the familiar imagery of state television into something simultaneously recognizable and strange.
Performance Video
Screen recording of the live-coded set.
现场编码的屏幕录制。
Recording of the live show.
演出现场录像。
Technical Elements
Sampling Pipeline
Clips from "Xinwen Lianbo" and "Ba Fang Lai Cai" were pre-mixed in Logic for smoother transitions, then hosted on GitHub and loaded into Strudel via its samples() API — a path that only worked once the sample root URL was corrected.
Chord-Matched Transition
To move coherently from the sampled music into original live coding, a new melody was written over the same chords — first practiced on the piano, then translated into Strudel note patterns with gain envelopes and distortion.
Stacked Live Structure
Multiple tracks of instruments, drums, and noise were composed in advance and layered with stack(), giving the set a reliable skeleton that could be mutated live — muting, swapping, and reshaping parts to create moments on the spot.
Hydra × p5.js Visuals
Archival broadcast footage is fed through Hydra's feedback, kaleid, and modulation chains, combined with p5.js to weave dynamic graphical elements into the imagery of state television.
Process
The musical arc was composed as a narrative. The set begins by sampling "Xinwen Lianbo," transitioning into "Ba Fang Lai Cai" as currency imagery enters the visuals. From there, piano-led original material takes over, combined with noise and a countdown effect to heighten tension, while broadcast phrases — "欢迎收看新闻联播" ("Welcome to Xinwen Lianbo"), "观众朋友们晚上好" ("Good evening, viewers") — punctuate the music for dramatic effect. The One-Child Policy segment turns darker: heavy drumbeats and reverb emulate children's heartbeats, intermittently pierced by infants' cries.
The performance itself took place in a garage, which brought its own drama: weak wifi — plus the VPN required to fetch the GitHub-hosted samples — caused connection failures at the start, fixed live on stage. Working in an unfamiliar environment made real-time adjustment essential, and the live coding tools turned those constraints into spontaneous, creative exchanges that pushed the set beyond what we had planned.
Reflections
The four of us divided roles by strength: Jenny and Audrey focused on the Hydra visuals, while Arial and I built the Strudel sound design and shaped the narrative direction — curating the historical content and sequencing the performance. I also crossed over to help debug the visuals and suggest stronger visual expressions.
Our initial plan laid out neatly structured sections for visuals, sound, and narration, but rehearsals taught us that real-time responsiveness mattered more than the script. By the night of the show — connection scares and all — the performance had become something more dynamic than what we first imagined, and we left the garage satisfied.
Performed with Jenny, Audrey, and Arial. Thanks to Professor Viola for untangling the Strudel sample-loading problem. Sound sources: "新闻联播" (CCTV) and "八方来财" by 揽佬 SKAI.
Built With
- Strudel
- Hydra
- p5.js
- Logic Pro
- GitHub-hosted Samples