This story aired in the May 29, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Did you know your muscles can make sound? Or that your heart and lungs are musical instruments just waiting to be played?
Well every Wednesday in the Mission District, people from artist and tech communities let go of assumptions about each other and their own bodies to create together. At Kinetech Arts open lab you can learn how to compose "organ" music.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: Walking into the ODC Commons in the Mission District on a Wednesday evening, is like stepping into a twilight zone of sorts - another dimension of sound.
REPORTER:... An electronic mix of metallic resonance, and a series of rolling low-frequency growls and high-pitched rattles and percussive cracks.
REPORTER: It's music from an unexpected source… a person tinkering with electronic gadgets scattered across a six-foot table in the dance studio. He looks like a latter-day frankenstein with electrodes and wires attached to his body.
WEIDONG YANG: So I have three electrodes, one on my left chest, one on my right chest, one on my belly. there's three distinct muscle groups.
REPORTER: This is Weidong Yang a data scientist whose day job is studying quantum dots. He goes by Wei.
WEI: When I compress myself. You hear this thunderous noise, that's the chest muscle.
REPORTER: Wei is a co-founder of Kinetech Arts. That’s the nonprofit organization that hosts these free weekly play labs. They welcome anyone interested in exploring the human-machine interplay like Wei is doing tonight…
REPORTER: The perpetual beat is Wei's heart playing percussion. His lungs add harmony and the whooshing sound is Wei compressing his pecs.
REPORTER: Wei improvises a dance while also manipulating a thin metal sheet the size of a windshield sunshade. it’s an old piece of technology, a thunder sheet invented in the early 1700’s to create theatrical sound effects. But Wei’s sheet is modernized… has a speaker and wires feeding into a device, which warps and bends the sounds into dissonant tonalities as he shakes and taps it.
DAIANE LOPES DA SILVA: Today we have a metal sheet that amplifies the sound, so there will be lots of sound going on today. Lots of vibration and stuff like that.
REPORTER: Straining to be heard over the wall of sound is Daiane Lopes da Silva, aka Dai. She’s a professional choreographer and Wei’s partner…. - in life, and as the co-founder of kinetech arts.
DAI: I will explain the technicalities of it, you can manipulate the sound with your body. So we’re gonna play with that today. It's gonna be fun.
REPORTER: They founded kinetech arts together in 2013 and for them, dance technology, fun and play have been essential to their relationship...ever since they met …
WEI: In ballet class, everybody's very formal, and I see, this beautiful free spirit moving across the floor, That's, how she caught my eye. Then we met in the salsa club. I'm a geek. I'm a nerd, right? The beautiful girls never talk to me. So it's like totally out of my league.I was like, whoa something's wrong today. She’s talking to me.
REPORTER: But opposites attract, right?
WEI: We got married, we start doing something at home…inviting friends over to play. I'm a geek naturally interested in how science and technology work. And she's the choreographer dancer. We naturally start experimenting.
REPORTER: Their alchemy of technology and dance was so much fun, they started inviting friends over to play
WEI & DAI: And people really loved it. Yeah. And we thought, oh, this is really amazing. People are interested. They were curious and lots of people were coming every week.
REPORTER: They decided to expand out of the house and formalize the open lab so more people could join the fun… but they ran into an unexpected headwind
WEI: Remember first time we had the engineers and dancers, artists together. Oh my God, everybody speaks English. It's a mess. No, nobody can understand each other.
REPORTER: It was like a tower of Babel, except English was the common language. But, there’s tech language, and there’s the aesthetic language of dance
DAI: I didn't even know anything about this world, and they start talking about Python and I'm l ike, why are they talking about snakes? What's going on? Oh my God. It was like we were totally lost in translation there. It was so confusing. I was like, oh my God, can we really do this? Yeah.
REPORTER: The confusion was on both sides
DAI: I would sometimes say, let's move through space. And that scientists would, would ask me what do you mean by walking through space? This language is so common for us. We don't even think about us. Like, oh my God, how do I explain what does it mean to walk through space?
REPORTER: They overcame this challenge, and ran straight into a wall … a touch wall screen dancers interacted with.
DAI: It was a water simulation.Everybody in the lab was fascinated by that wall.I was too, I thought, my God, this is so beautiful. but then I thought. Whoa, okay. step back, what is going on here? We are all fascinated by this wall and we are not dancing with each other anymore. That was a problem. Now the attention is on the wall and nobody cares about the dancers.
REPORTER: A fascination with the visual aspects of technology was overshadowing the dancers themselves….
WEI: Its, like every technology we developed at first, is purely fascination. The dancer gets lost, the visual always overpowered. That fascination is overwhelming.
REPORTER: Wei had an Aha moment. It’s the dancers we actually wanna watch. The technology could inform their movement, rather than overshadow it. And Dai had her own revelation.
DAI: And so I learned, That sound to me, it's like, oh my God, this is so beautiful. I start really enjoying and learning more about my body,
REPORTER: Turns out - technology expanded Dai’s creative expression
DAI: The way that I move when I have this device on my body is completely different than the way I move when I don't have it. It can be frustrating, but it's also an opportunity to learn how to express myself in different ways.
REPORTER: It’s tempting to think of Dai and Wei, as a cliche artist/scientist odd couple, but their shared openness to learning is what draws people to the lab.
REPORTER: Hannah Young has been coming since 2018.
HANNAH YOUNG: I heard about the lab through a friend, she said, Hey, you gotta come to this. Thing's super cool. Dai and Wei do an excellent job of creating a community that’s incredibly inclusive in an authentic way, and that's not something you can just find anywhere. So I appreciate it.
REPORTER: Tonight Hannah takes a turn as the musician. on the midi. She’s improvising with music from a human instrument and adding her own voice to the mix
REPORTER: Newcomer Jackson Kao is The Human Instrument. I ask him how it felt to be the designated lab rat strapped up with electrodes making organ music.
JACKSON: Really interesting, kind of strange and foreign territory. Yeah. The prospect of turning my body into an instrument was immediately exciting and made sense, even though I'd never really heard of it before.
REPORTER: But even here where fun and play are palpable in the atmosphere, the city’s ambient tensions filter in.
DAI: I've lost lots of collaborators. They just left the city, they can't afford this place anymore. There is definitely a tension in the city with the tech companies.
REPORTER: Kinetech Arts chooses not to dwell on this though
DAI: I'm in San Francisco, my partner likes the tools and there's potential here, so let's play. Let's see what happen right? When we create a space like that for people to be together, we also let go of lots of assumptions that we have about each other.
REPORTER: Wei and Dai describe Open Lab as a blank canvas that allows things to happen. And not to put too fine a point on it, after a clumsy-footed start, it's that open spirit that got the artists and the techies dancing in step. Maybe there’s a lesson here for the rest of the city.