The Idea
I’ve had this vision for some time. Actually, for more than a decade.
How many incredible artists, thinkers, poets and ideas have we never encountered simply because the system couldn’t sustain them? Not every valuable person is good at turning their work into a conventional career.
But today, we have something previous generations didn’t: technology that lets us connect directly across borders and build new ways of supporting creative work.
Technology is already making everything faster, easier and more optimised for the majority. That direction isn’t going away. But we can also use the same technology in the opposite direction — to make space for people, ideas and creative work that might otherwise disappear.
That is what I want Tribe Cocoro to explore.
Why This Matters
Tribe Cocoro is an experiment I created because I increasingly feel that we need new ways to value human creativity.
We are entering a major turning point.
AI can now generate music, images, stories and videos almost instantly. At the same time, much of the creative world is already organised around popularity — views, likes, streams, followers and engagement. Put those two things together, and I think we have a real problem.
The easiest things to produce, consume, optimise and make popular can increasingly fill everything around us. Meanwhile, quieter work can disappear. Difficult work. Personal work. Strange work. Work that may never reach millions of people, but might mean everything to a few hundred.
Human beings don’t simply generate results. We live first. We fall in love. We lose people. We move somewhere new. We remember things differently as we grow older. We carry regret, hope, relationships, places and memories.
And somehow, those experiences become music, paintings, films, stories and ideas.
That journey is part of the work.
That is the biggest difference between AI-generated work and human work.
Tribe Cocoro is an attempt to give more value to that.
Why I'm Starting With My Own Work
I’m Shu Yurimura, a Japanese composer living in France. I don’t know yet whether Tribe Cocoro will work. And I don’t want to pretend that I’ve already designed the perfect system.
So instead of waiting another ten years, I’m starting now. The first pilot begins with my own music, the stories behind it, and the small audience I already have.
People can give Cocoro directly to a piece of music, a video or the human story behind it.
And I want to go further than that.
If a piece of art makes someone remember something, write something, question something, or share a meaningful perspective, that response can become creative work in itself.
And if it resonates with other people, it can have value too. Eventually I want Cocoro to move not only from audience to artist, but between the people who gather around creative work.
This first version will be imperfect. Some parts will be manual. Some ideas will change. And that is the point of the pilot.
I want to learn what people actually value, what makes sense, what doesn’t, and what artists themselves would want from a system like this.
If this works, I don’t want Tribe Cocoro to remain a way of supporting my music. I want it to become another way of supporting human creativity.
And I want the people using it to help shape what it becomes.
Help Shape What Comes Next
Tribe Cocoro is still an experiment. Feedback, criticism, ideas and questions are all part of the process.
Who’s Behind Tribe Cocoro?
Shu Yurimura is a Japanese composer living in France. He has been thinking about ways to support meaningful creative work for more than a decade. Tribe Cocoro is his attempt to turn that long-held idea into something real, starting small and learning through action.
Tribe Cocoro
shu.hiraeth@gmail.com
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