Imagine a concert you can swim to. Enter a digital underwater world, take on the form of a fish, and find yourself inside music woven from an electronic composition, the human voice, and the real sounds of marine life.
This is precisely the kind of encounter offered by composer and performer An-Ting Chang and artist Ian Gallagher. Their project Underwater brings together underwater recordings, spatial sound, Chinese poetry, and moving digital landscapes.
On 29 and 30 October 2026 the creators invite participants to a free test of the online version. The musical immersion can be experienced from home — via a browser or a Windows app. This is a new stage of the project, whose stage premiere took place in May 2026 at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival.
Hearing life beneath the surface
For humans, the sea surface often becomes the boundary of the audible. We distinguish the surf, the wind, the cries of birds. Underwater, another sonic life goes on.
To draw closer to it, the creators of Underwater built their own recording system with four hydrophones — underwater microphones. This design makes it possible to work with spatial sound while preserving information about the directions from which the sound arrives.
The project's website lists the recording locations: Bali, Lanyu Island, Norfolk, and Maui. The collected materials become part of the musical work: An-Ting combines them with electronics and poetic lines.
Here a particular attentiveness to listening arises. Behind the familiar word "ocean," numerous voices, movements, and presences begin to be discerned. Water turns out to be a space of communication, most of which usually takes place beyond our perception.
A concert you can enter
In the stage version, the audience is surrounded by projections and a spatial acoustic system. The music gains volume, and digital landscapes unfold around the audience.
The online version carries this idea into an interactive environment: participants enter a three-dimensional world in the form of avatars and gain the opportunity to interact with the performers and other listeners. For the test sessions 29–30 October the creators propose an image especially suited to this world — becoming a fish. The sessions are scheduled for 18:30–19:30 British time.
There is a certain lightness to this invitation. To draw closer to the unfamiliar, it is sometimes worth beginning with play: to change one's point of view, to allow oneself curiosity, to enter where one had previously looked from afar.
Real sounds and imagined depths
In Underwater there are two distinct sources of expressiveness. The underwater recordings connect the work with the real marine environment. The visual part creates an artistic space, using among other things generative AI and three-dimensional point clouds.
What is seen in the project should therefore be perceived as a digital interpretation of the underwater world. It does not replace documentary footage and does not serve as a scientific reconstruction of an ecosystem. Its task is to give the music a space in which the listener can experience their own encounter with the ocean.
Here sound becomes the beginning of imagination. What is heard acquires colour, movement, depth — and invites a more attentive regard for the living world from which it came.
To enter the garden, to know spring
The work features lines from "The Peony Pavilion" by the Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. Their meaning can be conveyed thus: how can one know the beauty of spring without entering the garden? The creators have woven this poetic image into the fabric of the underwater journey.
For an encounter with music, this is a remarkably apt invitation.
One may know a great deal about sound — and yet one day hear the familiar world differently. To notice how attention changes when sound surrounds you on all sides. How recognition is born amid unfamiliar timbres. How one's own breathing becomes part of the moment being experienced.
What does this add to the sound of the planet?
Underwater opens yet another way of encounter between forms of life: through attention, creativity, and the ability to listen.
The human being brings composition, poetry and imagination to it. The marine environment brings its own sound patterns. The listener brings their own sensitivity, thanks to which this encounter is experienced anew each time.
For GAYA ONE such resonance is especially close: a space becomes richer when there is room in it for different voices and for the unique experience of each.
The planetary symphony is already sounding. And every time we hear more life in it, new possibilities arise for creating together.
