Year2026 TypeInteractive sound work Specs12 audio tracks, recorded alternating Chinese and English, looping in sync RolesWork, system design and audiobook recording: me; text processing after Dai Congrong's Chinese translation ShownFinal presentation, Department of Music Engineering, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, 2026.07.01 StatusComplete for now MediaPlayable web mixer (12 tracks); Induction Mixer performance video (phone recording) Overview riverrun is a sound work about Finnegans Wake. It currently has two versions: one you can play directly on this website, and one in which the 12 tracks are played on The Induction Mixer.

12 synchronised looping tracks, each one a different reading and gloss of the same text. The work asks a visitor to move among them — with a hand, or with a cursor — deciding what they can hear, and what they cannot.

Motivation Finnegans Wake is a book that cannot be read in full. Joyce spent seventeen years writing it, mixing more than eighty languages, with almost every word a portmanteau of several others. Dai Congrong's Chinese translation explains the book to the reader in a maximalist way, but the enormous apparatus of notes it brings makes reading difficult in a different way.

I wanted to find a way that neither leaves the audience at a loss before the original's very high threshold, nor overloads them by unfolding everything at once, nor lets the linearity of reading mislead them about the text.

The 12 tracks exist in space all at once, while a listener's hearing and physical position are both limited: to catch one image at any given moment necessarily means losing the others.

Two of the 12 tracks are not sounding all the time: they carry sound only in some passages, so if you do not move you lose their meaning. And every move is paid for by the track you are on: even coming closer to a neighbouring track lowers the absolute and relative loudness of the one you are hearing. The more you try to hear at once, the less you can take in.

With all 12 tracks present at low volume, the dense, quiet murmur is a steady density; pulling one track up on its own, the clear semantics come close to monologue.

The visitor is no longer a passive listener but a performer who has to move in order to hear.

Where it comes from I read this book during a period when I happened to be learning about Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is an unavoidable coordinate in contemporary psychoanalytic, philosophical and aesthetic research: Deleuze and Guattari discuss it in A Thousand Plateaus, where they make a well-known judgement: Joyce's words are "multiple-rooted", and while those words shatter the linear unity of the word and even of language, they re-establish a cyclic unity of the sentence, the text and knowledge.

So for me this book is less a named reference than an entry point. What I took from it was not its content but a question: the signifier can be split indefinitely, but once it is split, what do we actually get?

How it works The text is inherently polysemous. The first word, "riverrun", can be deconstructed into river run, reverend, and Erinnerung [German] (memory) — a river running, a priest carried downstream, and memory as water, all unfolding at once inside a single word.

I turned that polysemy into multiple physical tracks: the different readings of one word are assigned to different tracks, each recorded in five or six versions with different manners of pronunciation (alternating Chinese and English). When a visitor mixes, they are in effect in dialogue with Joyce's sinthome.

The text of three core tracks, side by side

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's,
from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius
vicus [Latin]
of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.

Track A (river run)

reverend, past Eve and Adam's,
from swerve of shore to Dublin Bay,
brings us by a Commodus
Vico
of recirculation back to
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.

Track B (reverend)

Erinnerung [German], past Eve and Adam's,
from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius
Vico [Italian]
of recirculation back to
Here Comes Everybody.

Track C (Erinnerung)

The work was first titled Here Comes Everybody.

The two versions The hardware version: the 12 tracks are played on The Induction Mixer. They feed the 12 antennas inside the instrument's panel and are transmitted by near-field electromagnetic induction; the player holds a pickup sensor and moves it above the panel — where your hand is, that is what you hear; move away and the sound fades. A 6-minute-13-second phone video documents one such performance. The audio is stereo, but the spatial effect of a phone recording is limited.

The digital version: on this website the work becomes an interactive spatial mixer — 12 synchronised looping tracks are laid out as numbered points on a two-dimensional panel, and the visitor wanders across it with a cursor, a single virtual microphone. Drawing near a point brings that track forward; moving away lets it sink back into the texture. On multi-touch devices every finger acts as an independent microphone. The mix is rendered through a built-in parallel effect chain into a continuously breathing sound field — reverb, echoes and a slowly swelling motion entwine, forming a blurred underlay to the work.

The digital version is an attempt to carry the work across as faithfully as possible, limited by not having the hardware of the original design: handing the spatial, bodily experience of mixing and reading back to the visitor in a form that is easier to reach.

Where it has been shown 2026.07.01, final presentation for the Department of Music Engineering, Shanghai Conservatory of Music.