Chinese Traditional Music in an Emerging Media Ecology

Abstract

The development of mobile internet and social media has significantly transformed the media environment surrounding the circulation of Chinese traditional music. Established modes of transmission—including oral teaching, stage performance, and mainstream media—have played important roles in cultural transmission and professional development, while facing limitations in their reach, audience structures, and forms of interaction. Emerging media, particularly short-video platforms, have introduced mobile, visual, platformized, and participatory modes of cultural production, reshaping how musical content is produced, circulated, and received and creating new possibilities and challenges for the contemporary communication of Chinese traditional music.

Drawing on communication studies, this paper examines the structural transformations that occur as Chinese traditional music enters short-video media environments, focusing on five dimensions: communicators, audiences, content, media, and communication effects. It argues that emerging media extend beyond the addition of new channels of circulation, reshaping creative agency, performance formats, content organization, and relationships with audiences. Cross-media expression, mobile viewing, user participation, and platform distribution enable traditional music to move beyond conventional performance spaces and generate new forms of cultural expression through its intersections with popular culture, visual narratives, and scenes of everyday life.

These transformations also raise concerns about content homogenization, entertainment-oriented production, and the growing influence of platform logics on cultural production. The circulation of Chinese traditional music through emerging media can therefore be understood as a broader process in which musical culture reorganizes its forms of expression, cultural meanings, and social relations within a changing media ecology. By reducing the interpretive distance between specialized musical traditions and broader publics, creating spaces for participatory interaction, and expanding possibilities for cross-cultural circulation, emerging media open new pathways for the public communication and contemporary transformation of Chinese traditional music.