Some call it "experimental," some call it "avant-garde" and some call it "sound art."
Others just call it noise.
That's what Fujui Wang (王福瑞), one of Taiwan's biggest proponents of the style, calls it. The tag isn't pejorative. When Wang, who heads the Digital Art Lab and Computer Music Lab at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), started the nation's first, now-defunct experimental music label in 1993, he called it exactly that: Noise.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF TNUA'S TECHART AND JOE COLLEY
Wang and others at the Center for Art and Technology at TNUA have gathered a dozen sound artists for TranSonic 2008, a weekend of performances and artist talks starting tonight at the Guling St Avant-Garde Theatre in Taipei.
Wang and graduate student Yao Chung-han (姚仲涵), who will both perform this weekend, played videos of several artists when I met them in a room brimming with computers, control boards, wires and speakers at TNUA last week.
Normally experimental music brings to mind bleeps and buzzes, TV static and awkwardly silent crowds who burst into nervous applause when each half-hour piece is finally finished, but there's more to it than that.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF TNUA'S TECHART AND JOE COLLEY
Nigel Brown, half of the Changhua- based Taiwanese-Australian duo 12 Dog Cycle, says that sound artists use "the sounds of the world around them, electronic sound, modified or self-built instruments, sounds from the body, silence, household or industrial goods and just about every other sound-producing thing imaginable."
"Most of the artists at TranSonic will use computers, but not all of them," Wang says. "And the sound doesn't usually come from the computer. The computer's just used to process the sounds."
Yao amplifies the sounds of fluorescent lights so you can hear the thumping and crackling of individual electrons slamming into the lights' anodes. Tomorrow night he'll be accompanied by the Taiwanese half of 12 Dog Cycle, Alice Chang (張惠笙), whose vocals range from "tiny textures of crackly breath to ear-shattering screams and everything in between," Brown says.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF TNUA'S TECHART AND JOE COLLEY
In 12 Dog Cycle's pieces, Chang's vocals are layered with sound by Brown, who uses a computer to "spatialize" drones from a piano accordion.
Other artists will use sound from a wide range of sources, including a machine that produces whistles from bottles, a microphone submerged in a giant fishbowl, and insects.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF TNUA'S TECHART AND JOE COLLEY
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s