Canto Cocktail is an interactive karaoke generator created by designer, programmer, and artist Henry Chu for the M+ Stories online platform. The work uses computational algorithms to compose new medleys from excerpts of 120 Cantopop songs, in a random operation that is based on chord patterns. Canto Cocktail is a comment on the structures of Cantopop, or Cantonese-language popular music. Through a relentless process of analysis, Chu examines the composition of songs, uncovering the hidden habits and mechanisms at work in the genre. The project echoes the increased use of machines for music-making and hints at an era when computers are creators rather than tools. It also relies on a shared cultural memory, and the randomised recombinations of pop songs can be both artificial and deeply personal.
Canto Cocktail features a list of songs from the 1970s to the 2010s as well as stock images and videos of generic natural landscapes and awkward love scenes—karaoke’s typical iconography. The interface allows the user to select the year of the song, performer type, speed, and key to generate unique medleys. Interacting with Canto Cocktail, you might discover similarities in chord progression across Cantopop hits, just as Chu first did as he played familiar melodies on the piano.
Canto Cocktail is the third work in M+’s series of digital commissions, which was launched in 2018. The series addresses aspects of digital culture today, pointing to new, pressing lines of enquiry. The experimental, browser-based works explore the intersection of visual culture and technology, encompassing data visualisation, interactive design, gamification, and creative technology.
About Henry Chu
Henry Chu is a Hong Kong–based designer, programmer, and media artist. He graduated from the Electrical and Computer Engineering programme at the University of Auckland and founded pill & pillow in 2004. The independent studio has won more than 140 local and international awards including recognition at the Cannes Lions, Webby, and One Show. His iPad music app Squiggle was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has been a speaker at Business of Design Week, TEDxKowloon, and TEDxTaipei.
About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s 21st century.
About the West Kowloon Cultural District
The West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing 23 hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.
