W.F. Umi Hsu (pronouns they/them) was born in Taipei and moved to Virginia at age 12. Hsu is a sound ethnographer and artist whose practice is driven by inquiries about sound and migratory communities. Their long term project explores Taiwan’s street sound cultures in relation to the urban underclass experience of city development, mobility, and technology. Working to create social change through sound, Hsu leads two projects: LA Listens, a sound-based community project that reflects on LA’s changing sensory and social ecology; and mobile placemaking collective Movable Parts. Hsu also writes songs about the melancholic postcolony in ghost pop band Bitter Party. With a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, Hsu has received fellowships and awards from National Endowment for the Arts, American Council for Learned Society, Shuttleworth Foundation, and LA Metro and has works presented by the Rubin Museum, Japanese American National Museum, CTM Festival in Berlin, Tuesday Night Cafe, and more. They teach an adjunct professor at USC and ArtCenter College of Design.
About
W.F. Umi Hsu (pronouns: they/them) writes here to reflect on the intersection among ethnography, civic innovation, and the arts, and on their research of urban sounds and music.Tags
APA music Asian American CDLR civic tech coding community arts critical making cyberpunk digital diaspora digital ethnography digital ethnomusicology digital humanities digital pedagogy dissertation DIY culture dzian! ethnography ethnomusicology experiment field notes Hakka Los Angeles M.I.A. mapping Movable Parts music in Asian America nakashi Obama Paperphone Pinko Communoids public scholarship race scholars lab SEM sound ethnography soundscape SPINearth Taiwan taqwacore The Kominas transnational video youtube 吳盛智 張震嶽
bio