Alter Ego is an interactive performance made in TouchDesigner and Ableton Live, controlled in real time through a pair of MIDI twisters. It stages an alternative storyline running between a traditional source and a modern one, using music as the medium the audience navigates between them.
The piece is built on top of Journey to the West, the classical Chinese legend of a long, mythic quest to retrieve a truth that will save humanity. It is one of the most retold stories in the world — TV, opera, games, children's books — which is precisely why it works here. The cultural memory is already loaded; the piece simply pulls on it from two directions at once.
Sound
The soundtrack is a remix of the 1986 theme for the original television adaptation of Journey to the West, a composition that has become a generational memory in China through sheer texture and repetition. The remix pulls the listener away from the instant emotional recognition of the original: the BPM is pushed up, the drum beat and strings take a more dominant position, and a layer of sound effects sits under the transitions to bridge between cues and to track the visual.
Visual
The imagery is composed in TouchDesigner and Processing. Clips from Journey to the West — the old television version and more recent re-makes — are run through Processing with an AI segmentation pass that cuts them into 2–5 second fragments of individual scenes. That fragment database is loaded into TouchDesigner, which re-arranges and re-composes it in sync with the beat. Scene changes are keyed to the music, not the other way around.
Interaction
A MIDI twister is the instrument of the performance. Turning knobs alters the volume and pitch of individual tracks, pushing certain elements forward at certain moments and walking the audience between the two storylines. When the drums and strings are dominant, the audience is inside the modern twist; when the traditional instruments take over, the old telling comes back to the surface. The operator is, in effect, cross-fading between two parallel histories of the same story.
References
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