Tag Archives: soundscape

building design research

My audio sabbatical (and the economic reality of my creative work)

A little while ago, I was awarded with a flash grant from Shuttleworth Foundation, thanks to Shuttleworth fellow Sean Bonner for his nomination. If you’re unfamiliar with Shuttleworth, it’s a neat foundation with a mission to create “an open knowledge society with limitless possibilities” through funding projects that embody the ethos of openness.

As a believer, thinker, and doer of open knowledge, Shuttleworth’s progressive message hits me close to home. This flash grant affirms my sharing of what I do while I am doing it, a work style that I’ve come to develop over the years. This openness challenges the competitive norms of this society, a world organized by individualism, meritocracy, and institutional forms of privatization and policy protectionism. In academia and the art/music world, I have learned and unlearned many lessons regarding the social consequences of knowledge production and dissemination.

To me, knowledge production has to be checked with social reality of what it does to our community. How do we talk about what we know? Who do we learn from? Who has access to this knowledge? Who is entitled to this knowledge? With whom should we share our learnings? Who benefits from this knowledge? Who is harmed by this knowledge? Which institutional and economic contexts support (or regulate) the production of knowledge? (I’ve talked about some of these concerns in the context of open access publishing and ethnomusicology previously.)

These are complex questions (and many folks including Deb Verhoeven, Kimberly Christen, and Michelle Kisliuk have spent lots of time thinking about this). The idea of openness itself is further complicated by the fact that there are multiple publics in the society, some weak, some strong. These questions form an ethical compass throughout all of my professional and creative endeavors. Because there are political and economical concerns tied to all knowledge production and dissemination, we should consider each context thoughtfully.

Last month, I completed a two-year fellowship. The ACLS Public Fellowship was a tremendous opportunity in which I learned my ways as a public-sector researcher and digital strategist during my time at the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The Shuttleworth grant came at a good time to help support my post-fellowship work in a few community sound projects that I’ve put on the back burner. Specifically the grant is supporting my time and labor while I make progress to deepen my sound-based research and creative engagement to re-make the public sphere in Los Angeles, a city that I came to adore and care for.

I’m making progress in LA Listens, a collaborative project that explores sounds of urban vibrancy in Los Angeles. In the last year, we developed a community-based methodology to engage with the social, ecological and experiential dimensions of the soundscape of city streets. Our methodology has contributed to the creative re-imagining of the acoustic public of particular locales and broader civic discussions about the role of sound in neighborhood changes and urban planning policy. Through a collaboration with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), We have shared research narratives including sound compositions based on our data have spurred a series of sound walks, location recordings, and sound-based provocations among urban planners and organizers in cities worldwide (summarized in this CityLab article by the Atlantic). I’m using my time to explore possible community partnerships and share our project reflection as blog posts and possibly a journal article. I’m also excited about funding a research internship for the project. Rounak Maiti, a former student from Occidental College, has joined the team to assist with field recording analysis and re-composition.

Soundwalk in Boyle Heights neighborhood, Los Angeles
Soundwalk in Boyle Heights neighborhood, Los Angeles

I have remobilized the Movable Parts team (a socially concerned maker collective) to produce a creative intervention regarding the collective mobility experience in LA. With a microgrant from Metro, we built a prototype for Movable Karaoke, a participatory multilingual system on a pedicab. During California Rideshare Week, we staged a series of karaoke events through the streets and at transit hubs such as metro stations, bus stops, sidewalk, parklets and plazas (documented on instagram). Residents and passersby in Koreatown, East Hollywood, Thai Town, Hollywood, Chinatown, and Pershing Square came to us, with adults sharing personally meaningful songs, children trotting along on the sidewalk and in the schoolyard. In the coming weeks, I plan to share my thoughts on rickshaw design along with some stories and experiences of collective mobility.

Movable Karaoke, Chinatown
Movable Karaoke, Chinatown

Working with fellow sound ethnomusicologist Yun Emily Wang, I’m co-designing a sound installation that will be included as a part of an exhibition at the upcoming Society of Ethnomuisoclogy meeting in Austin, Texas. This collaborative project will explore the meaning of  “雜 (dza) through materializing the mixed, blended, miscellaneous, and insignificant odds and ends of sounds in Taiwan.” This coming Wednesday, I will be recording a live video set with my ghost pop band Bitter Party for the Ear Meal Webcast series. This performance will feature field recordings collected from recent trips to Taiwan, adding a new context to the band’s ethnographically driven song arrangement.

Concept drawings for Dza, a sound installtion for SEM
Concept drawings for Dza, a sound installation for SEM

Labor and time are the building blocks in our creative economy. I give a shout out to Shuttleworth for playing a critical role in supporting me through this highly creative period, and for sustaining our broader creative ecology. Honored and thankful, I will continually share what I do in these exciting projects in the near future.

 

 

 

 

 

fieldnotes press research

More politics in sounds than what’s printed

An article about sounds in Taiwan came out in Taiwan Today, an online news digest in English published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Republic of China (the official, government-sanctioned name of Taiwan). The author of the article Steve Hands contacted me a few weeks ago asking me a set of interview questions regarding my recent field (recording) trip to Taipei. My answers reflect a critical angle, particular of the government; but only parts of my personal narrative and ethnographic research rendered as apolitical were included in the final version of this tourist-friendly article. I’m happy to engage in a conversation about Taiwan’s unique soundscape. But I thought that I would provide my complete answers to his interview questions in this post. With context, I hope to nudge this dialog to move alongside some of the social and political issues at stake.

Taiwan Today: What is your favorite Taiwan sound?

Me: The street vendors in Taiwan use the available technology, often low-resource materials like a megaphone or a car stereo system hooked up to a loudspeaker, to make audible their presence and whatever products or services they’re selling. Among these sound street vendors, I am most fascinated by the sound of the mobile street vendors. An ingenious setup, street vendors can create a space of their own through sound, using sound to form a sonic public with invisible and moving boundaries. This sonic and mobile structure covers much more space than a stationary vending setup, because sounds travel through air and in space much farther than visual and stationary objects.I have very fond memories of hearing the sound of truck vendors that sell clay-roasted ducks around my neighborhood. There are less motorized versions like the sweet potato (Yam) vendor who uses a rattle to attract people. Specifically I went around Taipei looking for recyclers who peddle through the city on a tricycle (sometimes motorized) on this trip. These recyclers use a sound system to project messages to inform local residents of their service to pick up recyclable goods like bottles and jars, scraps of paper, metal and plastic, and sometimes electronics.

The city-sanctioned trash trucks have followed this practice to make audible their pickup service, except other than using a person’s voice pre-recorded onto tape or CD, the city trash pickup sounds more institutionalized with its pre-programmed MIDI of classical music (Beethoven’s Fur Elise). The choice of “classy” sound, I think, is intended to draw distinctions from other unsanctioned street vendors. These sound trucks are also used outside of commercial contexts. I have seen versions of musical trucks (a wide variety including nakashi trucks and Electric Flower Truck 電子花車), and recorded one — the Exhortation Tricycle that Tours Taiwan — that sits in front the Longshan Temple on this trip. I have recorded some political campaign trucks that are set up similarly, using loudspeakers to project live and recorded campaign related messages.

Unfortunately, these mobile street vendors rarely broadcast sounds into the streets as they travel. The sonic publics that they create are disappearing. I have a feeling that their vanishing is a result of the noise ordinance and regulations due to the interest of developers and private-public partnerships, and and other gentrification related issues.

Taiwan Today: At one point you mentioned the Chinese concept of renao. Could you elaborate on this a little? Is this a big difference between East and West, a love versus a dislike of noise? What are the best places for a tourist to experience Taiwan’s renao?

Me: Renao is a rich concept and it’s more complex in practice. “Re” 熱 refers to heat, or a heated state of being and sociality. Nao 鬧 refers a space or an event that is marked by noisiness, loudness, and movement. Together, renao as a term refers to a hyper state of social energy that is expressed through movement. The closest concept to renao in the Anglophone world is bustling. Bustling suggests a social state that marked by people’s movement through space.

What marks renao as a unique concept is that sound is a core expression and constitution of its physical manifestation. Richness in sound and movement makes up the transient experience of a “heated” sociality. Traditionally, one could experience renao or ken renao (看熱鬧) in front of the temple of the town or village, where there is the most foot traffic. It is also there where street vendors, musicians, and beggars gather forming the infrastructure for an informal local economy.

Nowadays, renao is experienced in public spaces like parks, markets (day market or night market), and occasionally in the streets during temple festivals and political campagins. Definitions of noise are socially constructed. What’s considered to the loud and noisy in one cultural context can be constitute the everyday life in another culture. (My friend Yun Emily Wang has written a MA thesis about the meaning of sound in Taipei. In it, she draws a distinction between renao and chaonao 吵鬧 in the way people use these terms to make social boundaries.) My sense is that renao as a practice is being challenged at the moment. Renao has been linked with the lowerclass. With the shrinkage of public spaces, and the government’s efforts behind cleaning up the streets (in corroboration with private entities like developers), renao has begun to decay in sound and in practice.