November 11, 2026
A lecture-recital on the Chinese Guqin and AI by Dr. Youdi Wang and Dr. Bing Wei.
The guqin, China’s seven-string zither, is among the oldest instruments still played. Traditionally traced back three thousand years, it served generations of scholars as a practice of self-cultivation. In 1977, Guan Pinghu’s guqin performance of “Flowing Streams” was chosen for the Voyager Golden Record, humanity’s message to the cosmos.
Yet what traveled into space was a single performance. On the page, the music survives as a tablature that records precisely which string to pluck, where to press, and how each hand should move, but leaves rhythm and expressive proportion to the performer. Each piece must therefore be brought to life anew by every player and passed from teacher to student. Where that chain breaks, the music falls silent: of more than three thousand pieces in historical handbooks, fewer than a hundred are regularly played.
What happens when a machine joins this chain of transmission? For five years, Youdi Wang, the first Ph.D. in guqin performance in China, and Bing Wei, an engineer and artist, both Visiting Scholars at Harvard FAS CAMLab, have pursued this question. Their research teaches computers to read guqin tablature, links notation to sound and performance, and tests whether artificial intelligence can help revive silent pieces or even compose new ones. Each step raises a deeper question: when an open, interpretive tradition becomes explicit data, what is preserved, and what is lost?
Interweaving live performance, from traditional masterworks to an AI-composed guqin piece, with demonstration and conversation, this lecture-recital moves between score, hand, and machine. The guqin’s history offers a lesson that reaches beyond music: continuity is sustained not by fixing everything, but by leaving each generation room to interpret anew. As AI expands the horizons of creation, this lesson leads to the evening’s central question: how can a civilization keep changing and still recognize itself?
Further information
- Location: Weiss 235
- Time: 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
- Cost: Free