[Photo/eastday.com]

On April 17, the Shanghai Concert Hall hosted a groundbreaking concert uniting a celebrated pingtan artist and an AI robotic singer of shidaiqu, delivering an enchanting musical odyssey.

Both pingtan and shidaiqu stand as cultural treasures in Shanghai.

Pingtan, also known as Suzhou Pingtan, combines storytelling and theatrical performance in the Wu dialect, predominantly spoken in Shanghai, Zhejiang province, and the southern part of Jiangsu province along the Yangtze River.

Shidaiqu, translating to "songs of the era", encompasses the jazzy-sounding tunes popular in the 1920s-1940s in Shanghai.

The concert, employing modern electronic music as its backdrop and a pingtan performer as the storyteller, reveals the tale of a bewildered woman navigating the information age, embarking on a spiritual quest by revisiting historical memories.

Part of the "Digi Muse – 2024 Music+Technology Festival" at the Shanghai Concert Hall, the experimental performance, jointly crafted by Limage Studio and the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe, aims to showcase the innovative collaborations between musicians and scientists.

Fang Jing, the general manager of the concert hall, expressed the festival's goal to "present the excellent innovations coming out of collaborations between musicians and scientists, and hopefully explore various ways in which technology can better empower arts and arts can better enrich technology" in a previous interview.

In this collaborative concert involving pingtan artists, musicians, new media designers, algorithm experts, and researchers from diverse professional fields, Gao Bowen, the director of the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe, assumed the role of the narrator. Reflecting on the performance, Gao expressed that the concert was "extremely exhilarating", highlighting how AI has enabled pingtan performances to seamlessly traverse time and space.

Source: eastday.com