Pressure Project 3: A Sonic Quilt of Taiwan

As a choreographer, much of my creative research and artistic practice emanates from my identity as a Taiwanese-American. My choreography is deeply concerned with ideas of hybridity, multilingualism, and interculturalism. I see intercultural encounters existing within each and every interaction with another individual or environment.  

This past summer, I had the opportunity to return to Taiwan for a 6-week research trip. During this trip, I created a daily practice of capturing artefacts of Taiwan through video, photo, and sound. I am particularly drawn to sonic artefacts due to their ability to completely just place me in a fully embodied sensory memory. In all honesty, upon returning to the US in June, I had procrastinated listening to and digesting what all these sonic artefacts meant to me. This pressure project 3 felt like the perfect time to listen to and layer these artefacts into a quilt of what Taiwan sounds like to me.  

Because I had captured sound recordings daily, I spent a considerable amount of time identifying which sounds I wanted to integrate. The first sonic artefact that I instinctively wanted to utilize was an audio recording of my mom and two of my aunts in conversation. I was deeply drawn to this recording for many reasons. I can track a different closeness with each of them and I have, at various times throughout my life, lived with and depended upon each of them. There is a strong feeling and memory of home in this recording; it immediately evokes early memories of sitting around the living room table, eating snacks, and hearing a wash of languages over me. In the sound recording, they are speaking in both Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, sometimes switching between languages every other word. I am not very fluent in Taiwanese, but have always been so enthralled by the rhythmic quality of the language and its seven tonalities. I initially desired to split up the audio track by speaker but found this process quite difficult due to my mom and aunts interrupting and speaking over each other. 

I chose to interrupt the sequence of the conversation with recordings of birds chirping at the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial in Taipei, the sounds of cicadas on the mountains near Taipei National University of the Arts, a local temple playing rhythmic cymbals and gongs on a procession, and the theme song of the grocery store Px Mart. As I was selecting each of these sounds, I was reminded of the most quintessential sound of Taiwan through a garbage truck playing Für Elise to signal that it was time to take out the trash. At any time of day, throughout all of Taiwan, you can hear Für Elise played through the sound systems of a garbage truck to let people know it’s time to bring their trash out. I chose to layer all of these sonic artefacts together to build a cacophony. This layering is legitimately how Taiwan sounds to me—that at any moment, you can hear ancient cymbals and brass instruments against the electronic humming of Für Elise, the zooming of mopeds, and people speaking in multiple languages.  

In our in-class feedback, it was super interesting to hear how people resonated with feelings of home, comfort, and traveling in and out of different locations. I deeply appreciated how people identified that there was clearly a different meaning for Für Elise in the context of these sonic artefacts, perhaps evoking a memory of ice cream trucks in the US. I always personally experience an activation of the imagination when listening to these sounds and was encouraged to hear that others had a similar experience—that they were able to imagine for themselves what visuals or memories might accompany the sounds.  

Lastly, we briefly touched upon why I chose to use Isadora to edit the sound together and it prompted a very interesting reflection on ways of making and how different programs and software support different ways of making. It reminded me of our class conversations about Software Takes Command and how different software embody a myriad of values based upon their design and how those values might ripple down to us as users. This prompted a lot of self-reflexivity on my biases in making and what is rippling out into the work that I create. I value non-linearity in making. I frequently will take movement apart and put it back together again in a different sequence in an attempt towards meaning-making. This approach was supported through using Isadora. I felt incredible freedom to start in what ended up being the middle or climax of my sonic quilt with layering different sounds before I chopped up the conversation recording and added the beginning and ending.