Tears That Can't Be Calculated, Empathy That Can't Be Downloaded: Chen Chien-Chi and Chen Yen-Chih Reveal the Moments That Move Us in Concerts

After a concert ends, the stage lights dim and the music stops—the meticulously designed audiovisual effects fade away. Yet certain heart-stirring moments linger in the audience's memory long after they leave. Perhaps it's when a familiar intro plays and the entire crowd instantly sings along; or when tens of thousands of phones or glow sticks suddenly light up, creating another landscape beyond the stage; or simply when the spotlight sweeps across the room, and performers and audience fall silent together, sharing a moment that exists only in that instant. These unpredictable, unreproducible moments are precisely what make live performances so captivating.

The third 2026 installment of 'Taipei New Horizon Masters Salon,' titled 'From AI to I: The Moments That Move Us,' invited three-time Golden Melody Award-winning music producer Chen Chien-Chi and Bing Creative's Creative & Design Director Chen Yen-Chih. From perspectives of visual design, musical arrangement, and live experience, they shared how a performance evolves from creative concept to reality—and how creators embed personal life experiences and emotions into their work, enabling unique, unrepeatable experiences through performer-audience interaction and mutual empathy.

Returning from 'Digital Loneliness' to Live Experience: Chen Chien-Chi on Breaking Rules to Create Your Own Style

Taiwan’s iconic pop music producer Chen Chien-Chi opened by questioning whether genuine emotions hidden behind texts and images are truly understood when we're constantly connected through groups and social media, bombarded with endless short videos and messages. He coined the term 'digital loneliness' to describe this state—seemingly always linked to the world, yet growing ever more distant from one another. 'In contrast, live performances like concerts and theater gather people in the same time and space—cheering together, falling silent together, raising or lowering glow sticks in unison with the melody. Every immediate reaction becomes part of the show. These emotions and interactions cannot be fully conveyed through screens, making live experiences something you cannot download, replay, or perfectly recreate.'

Chen Chien-Chi’s creative process always begins with 'feeling.' Not formally trained in music, he entered theater through drama clubs in high school and university, starting by composing for plays. He learned to transform abstract, emotional descriptions from directors—such as 'like a flowing river' or 'like a girl’s collapsing heart'—into melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, turning invisible emotions into sounds the audience could hear and feel. This theater background shaped his later creative approach: first identify what the work wants to say through feeling, then use musical techniques and structure to ground that emotion.

During the encore of Ella Chen’s concert, he interwove verses, choruses, and lyrics from 'To My Fifteen-Year-Old Self' and 'I Like You Just the Way You Are,' letting one song reflect on the past while the other responds to the present. In Mayday’s arrangement of 'Noah's Ark,' he used strings ascending from low to high frequencies, combined with deliberately retained dissonant intervals, to depict the emotional journey 'from darkness to light.' These choices weren’t based on formulas but emerged from emotional intent, later realized through music theory and arrangement. For Chen Chien-Chi, scales, chords, composition principles, and even AI are merely tools to help creators realize ideas. What truly defines a work is how creators distill life experiences into personal feelings and make unique choices at critical moments: 'Once you understand the rules, the most powerful thing is to break them—to create your own style.'

Three-time award-winning music producer Chen Chien-Chi transforms theatrical sensibilities into musical language, crafting sonic landscapes that reach straight into the heart.

Chen Yen-Chih: Concerts Are Not Just Performances—They’re Live Human Connections

'We live in an oversaturated audiovisual era. We must ask: How do we get audiences to put down their phones and engage with the live moment?' Chen Yen-Chih, who has long been involved in large-scale concert creativity and visual production, emphasized that what concerts should truly design isn’t just stage lighting and effects—but the emotions and experiences audiences undergo live. From a song, an image, to lighting and stage choreography, every detail results from repeated discussions, debates, and trade-offs by the production team, aiming to craft an emotional arc that guides the audience into and out of deep feelings.

Chen Yen-Chih described concerts as 'a journey with music.' Creators can anticipate when audiences will scream or cry, carefully designing each emotional turn—but they can never fully predict what will happen live. Audience cheers, silence, singing along, or even spontaneous reactions may become part of the performance. Precisely because of this, the most precious aspect of a concert has never been its perfectly replicable stage effects, but the shared moment co-created by performers and audiences in the same time and space.

Using Mayday’s performance of 'I Don’t Want You to Be Alone' as an example, Chen Yen-Chih shared how they originally conceived a 'Tree of Life' growing from the center of the stage, with energy flowing upward along the trunk and finally bursting into fireworks across the sky. Unexpectedly, after the show, a fan offered a different interpretation: seeing the scattered glow sticks in the audience as the roots of the tree anchored in the earth. Light gathered from the seats to the stage, then bloomed upward along the branches—transforming the 'Tree of Life,' once confined to the stage, into a living entity extending into the audience. This feedback deeply moved Chen Yen-Chih: 'This is exactly what makes live creation so magical. When the work reaches the audience, their feelings and imaginations become part of it, allowing the original design to keep growing and develop its own “second life.”'

Chen Yen-Chih believes that when the audience becomes part of the artwork, the live event gains an irreplicable vitality.

From AI to I: Technology Takes Creation Further, But Human Feeling Makes It Resonate

'Technology can expand the boundaries of creation, but what truly makes a work endure is the authentic, profound connection between people and the world, and between people themselves,' said Liu Li-Hui, General Manager of Taipei New Horizon. From program design, visual storytelling, musical arrangement to audience participation, both speakers converged on one core idea: as technology makes content production faster and more efficient, what remains truly valuable in creation is our human sensitivity to the world and our ability to make meaningful choices among infinite possibilities. 'The Taipei New Horizon Masters Salon series, themed “From AI to I,” aims to refocus attention on the “I”—the human self—in this era of rapid technological advancement. Drawing from diverse creative fields, we hope to inspire reflection on how we preserve our capacity to feel, form our own perspectives, and transform those feelings into creations that resonate with others.'

Chen Chien-Chi, Chen Yen-Chih, and over 200 audience members together created an unforgettable, unrepeatable exchange.

The 2026 'Taipei New Horizon Masters Salon' invites audiences into various creative frontlines, witnessing the convergence of technology and humanity, and contemplating where the relationship between creation and humans will go amid rapid technological change. Going forward, Taipei New Horizon will continue serving as a cross-domain exchange platform, inviting creators from technology, art, culture, and everyday life to share frontline insights and observations. By sparking dialogues across different viewpoints, they aim to continuously inject new imagination and possibilities into cultural creativity. For latest updates and highlights, visit: Taipei New Horizon Official Website: https://www.taipeinewhorizon.com.tw/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/taipeinewhorizon/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taipeinewhorizon/