This article is part of an ongoing series exploring different dimensions of working with sound across creative and cultural contexts.

“ХИЙМЭЛ ОЮУН” (khii-mel o-yun) — or “XO” for short — is the Mongolian term for AI. For CPinMongolia.com we designed this XO logo to identify articles about research and creative practices that explore how imaginative minds are engaging with AI not as a replacement, but as a co-creator in their artistic and inter-cultural expression.

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Udgan Tenger (Удган тэнгэр) draws on the Mongolian language of tenger (тэнгэр) — sky, heavenly realm, as in tengeriin oron (тэнгэрийн орон), and protective ancestral presence. The title joins udgan (удган), a female spiritual figure, with tenger, suggesting a maternal sky-spirit or guardian. From my reading, the title, song and melody carry a deeply Mongolian sense of lineage, protection, gratitude, and also loss: women of the maternal bloodline and paternal bone-line becoming, through memory and devotion, gathered into the limitless blue sky above.

The title may also be heard within a wider Mongolian world in which sky, memory, kinship, and unseen protection are felt together in the living texture of family and place (cf. Humphrey and Onon 1996; Buyandelger 2013). Scholarship treats tenger as more than the visible sky: it may also be understood as a source of power, blessings, and protection (cf. Heissig 1980; Atwood 2004). Recent ethnography, especially Manduhai Buyandelger’s work, shows how memory, gender, loss, and restored ritual practice can shape the way families understand ancestral presence in contemporary Mongolia (cf. Buyandelger 2013).

For Udgan Tenger, then, my reading is relational: the song gathers women, mothers, grandmothers, sky, and blessing into one image. The sky becomes both vast and intimate — the blue expanse above the steppe, and the remembered nearness of those who may still protect the living.

The AI music video’s visualisation gives this idea form: the young woman at its centre anchors the image, becoming a temporal embodiment of these lineages — women, memory, protection, and the blue sky gathered into one Mongolian imaginative world.

It is also worth turning to Khusugtun’s original release (see below), not as a simple comparison of “old” and “new,” but as a way of hearing this beautiful song’s earlier musical life before it was taken up and reworked by other creative artists with AI. The imagery they project, and the degree to which each is culturally embedded, seem quite different. But how different are they? Over to you …

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NOTES

On Popularity

The recently AI-generated music video, released on 28 March 2026, exemplifies older Mongolian cultural ideas entering a new creative register. Made by a Korea-based Mongolian AI-arts collective, the video appears to reactivate the song’s symbolic world through digital image-making: udgan, tenger, mothers, grandmothers, blue sky, blessing, and ancestral nearness are carried into an AI language.

Its popularity — more than 80,000 views within the first month of going live — is striking, especially within the still niche sphere of Mongolian AI music-making. The response may have several causes: the continuing appeal of the song itself, including its association with Khusmugtun’s original release of the song on 4 April 2021 [477,000 views to date] ; this ensemble’s international reputation for bringing Mongolian traditional music, throat singing, and nomadic cultural sound-worlds to wider global stages, including the BBC Proms; the emotional force of the song’s maternal and ancestral themes; the high quality of the AI-generated male vocal; or just curiosity about AI music-making as such. The visualisation itself is relatively modest — after the first viewing, I now find myself preferring to listen rather than watch — so the response seems unlikely to rest on the music video’s spectacle alone.

By contrast, I find that Khusmugtun’s stationary visual image, though simple, gives me far more to sit with: it quietly frames the music, carries a surprising amount of embedded cultural information, opens space for listening, and adds to my enjoyment rather than distracting from it. The current appeal of the AI version seems to lie elsewhere. More likely, the AI version brings together a familiar and culturally resonant song, a deeply recognisable sentiment, an echo of an internationally respected Mongolian band, and the novelty of AI production in a form that viewers find easy to receive and share.

The on-screen lyrics are also worth noting. They make the video not only a visual intermedia artwork, but also a singable, shareable object — perhaps a contemporary digital echo of communal singing practice, even when encountered by one person alone. In this sense, the video may transmit not only Mongolian cultural imagery, but also a mode of participation: inviting a viewer to follow the words, remember them, and perhaps sing along, whether privately or with others. The result is less a break with tradition than a new medium through which tenger might still be seen, felt, addressed, and sung.

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“Tenger”

For readers less familiar with Mongolian cultural language, it may be helpful to clarify the concept of Tenger (тэнгэр) before assigning it to any single belief system.

From a nomadic perspective, it names the sky under which life is lived: weather, pasture, road, herd, household, fortune, and loss. And from a shamanic perspective, it can also name a field of power and ancestral relation, where protection, obligation, memory, and unseen presence remain active in family and place (cf. Buyandelger 2013; Buyandelger 2019; Pedersen 2011; Merli 2020). From a Mongolian Buddhist perspective, by contrast, tenger-language may appear alongside Buddhist ritual worlds, sacred mountains, local deities, ovoo practice, and protective forces; but this does not make tenger simply Buddhist. David Sneath’s work is again useful here because it shows how Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist ritual idioms may overlap around local deities and sacred landscapes, while still being reworked as distinctly Mongolian cultural and national forms (cf. Sneath 2018a; Sneath 2018b).

This differentiation matters for Udgan Tenger. The song’s imagery may stand near Buddhist worlds, especially in a Mongolian setting where Buddhist, ancestral, local, and sky-oriented vocabularies have long circulated together. But the song’s centre of gravity is not doctrinal Buddhism. It lies in a Mongolian sense of sky, lineage, maternal presence, memory, and protection. Comparative work on Buryatia makes this point carefully: Buddhist and non-Buddist ritual forms can coexist, compete, and borrow from one another while remaining different ways of making history, belonging, and ancestral presence meaningful (cf. Quijada 2019).

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Performer-Audience “relationship”

How each of the above music videos is read will also depend on the listener-viewer: on what histories, images, religious languages, family memories, technical interests, and cultural expectations they bring to the act of watching and listening. Some may hear primarily tenger, kinship, and ancestral protection; others may be listening for the technical skill of the AI creators themselves. In that light, I read Udgan Tenger as a Mongolian song of tenger: a sky-held field of kinship, blessing, and remembrance. I also find both versions deeply enjoyable, but for different reasons. Now here’s a question:

What do you think?

What does each of these music videos offer, and what does each one “say” to you?

Many other threads could be followed up here — voice, image, memory, AI craft, musical tradition and inheritance, diaspora creativity, and the changing ways Mongolian songs travel online — but for now, I’ll stop here.

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If I have made any errors in this interpretation of Mongolian cultural language and meaning, they are entirely my own, and for these I humbly apologise.

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FURTHER READING

Letter from Mongolia 14: Chandmani Erdene

Atwood, Christopher P. 2004. Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. New York: Facts On File.

Buyandelger, Manduhai. 2019. “Asocial Memories, ‘Poisonous Knowledge’, and Haunting in Mongolia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no. 2: 283–301.

Buyandelger, Manduhai. 2013. Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heissig, Walther. 1980. The Religions of Mongolia. Translated by Geoffrey Samuel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Humphrey, Caroline, and Urgunge Onon. 1996. Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Merli, Laetitia. 2020. “Shamanism in Mongolia: Women, Mother-Earth and the World.” In The Shamaness in Asia: Gender, Religion and the State, edited by Davide Torri and Sophie Roche, 245–259. Abingdon: Routledge.

Quijada, Justine Buck. 2019. Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets: Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sneath, David. 2018a. “Ritual Idioms and Spatial Orders: Comparing the Rites for Mongolian and Tibetan ‘Local Deities.’” In Mongolia Remade: Post-Socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics, 163–174. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Sneath, David. 2018b. “Nationalizing Civilizational Resources: Sacred Mountains and Cosmopolitical Ritual in Mongolia.” In Mongolia Remade: Post-Socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics, 175–192. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Please refer to the INDEX for other music and articles that may be of interest.

© 2013-2026. CP in Mongolia. “Letter from Mongolia 19: Udgan Tenger” is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. ScholarGPT provided an additional channel for research. Documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. Posted: 6 May 2026. Last updated: 6 May 2026.