To Perform/ To Live: Decolonizing of Digital Music Instruments and Feminism with Human-AI Co-Created Embodied Experience of Daily Objects

Abstract

This paper proposes a decolonial approach to interactive music performance grounded in Chinese everyday life. Responding to critiques that dominant interaction models and evaluation norms often reflect Western legacies, we design locally situated digital musical instruments (DMIs) that treat domestic routines as primary interface logic. Our embodied performance system, To Perform/To Live, repurposes familiar objects used in Chinese women’s daily lives: an abacus, a vegetable washing basin, a soup pot, a fan, and a massage hammer. Across three stages, performers transform counting, soup-making, and restoration gestures into musical control through tempo, pressure, repetition, and pause, rendering gendered labor audible without romanticizing it. After each performance, we extend the work through human–AI co-creation: recorded audio is analyzed to generate a terrain-like surface, 3D printed as a tactile disk that encodes the performance for touch and re-performance. We contribute a China-situated decolonial DMI strategy, a feminist sonic practice of performable labor, and the E2E framework linking embodied knowledge to AI-enabled material extensions.