Low Tech CitySound
Installation + Participatory Electronics Sound Walk
Shenzhen’s Urban Sounds Through Low Tech Electronics
In Collaboration with Bo Dong + Zhaorui Liu
2024
“Low-Tech CitySound” is a project in which 11 young adults built their own low-tech audio recorders and took these recorders on a soundwalk through Shenzhen to collect site-specific sounds from the city. In the installation on display, the audience interacts with the mediated sounds via a custom-made interface, thereby producing a narrative out of the sound recordings and accompanying location video fragments. “Low-Tech CitySound” is based on a workshop that the SUSTech School of Design’s Sound Studies Group conducted earlier this year, where young adults learnt to solder electronic circuits and design their own shape of a wearable recorder. These devices look like low-tech electronics but have high-tech features that allow them to record, store, and playback environmental recordings. The participants used the self-made wearable recorders to capture sounds of their liking in the city, and brought them back into the exhibition, where we can relive their individual perspectives on the soundscape of Shenzhen. Yet, this present soundscape is highly mediated and “distorted” through technology that blends “low-fi” with “high-fi” – thereby reflecting the core spirit of Shenzhen. “Low-Tech CitySound” explores how technology and cities are always connected in diverse ways, showing the intersectional space of low and high tech.
#Shenzhen Soundscape
#Low Tech Electronics
#Participatory
Production team: Bo Dong (workshop, installation), Zhaorui Liu (electronics + tech development), Simeng Wang (workshop), Binghuang Xu (field work)
The workshop took place at, and first public exhibition, at SeeD Creative Commune’s “SeeDling Art Fair,” Shenzhen, 2024
Flowing Sound
Mobile Media Installation + Artistic Research
Portable, Low-Fi Sound Sources in Shenzhen City
With a Dictionary of Moving Sound Sources
With Yaohan Zhang and Yujing Ma
2024
“Flowing Sound” takes as its starting point the idea that much of the sound in Shenzhen is dynamic and is “flowing,” that is, it is emitted from portable, moving technological sources that span a provisional sonic network across the city, thereby connecting “low tech” and “high tech” purposes and neighborhoods with one another. What emerges is an “aural economy” (Molina 2020) in which technological sound and media sources can teach us something about Shenzhen-Pingshan. The artwork is based on intense fieldwork to collect, record, and track moving media and sounds in the city. The project team then categorizes the found media and is in the process of developing and establishing a dynamic “working dictionary” of moving media and sound sources of Shenzhen. Collected sound sources are brought back into the street on a provisiaonal cart, enabling conversations with the community around sonic ephemera in the city. The results of both the dictionary and the street performance are exhibited as mobile installation with LED screens and low-fi loudspeaker devices in a gallery. “Flowing Sound” combines sound, video, performance, community-participation, background research, fieldwork, computational data analysis and visualization, and a digital archive building into a multimodal artwork and a body of artistic research.
#City Sound
#Portable Sound
#Low-Tech Sound
First exhibited at PAM Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen (2024)
Production team: Yaohan Zhang, Yujing Ma, Xiaoyao Ma, Sihui Li, Ziye Chen
In Idle Mode (Noise)
Installation + Artistic Research
Data-Driven Sound
Fish Farming Noise Scapes in the Pearl River Delta
2022 - 2024
In Idle Mode (Noise) thematizes the ambiguous role of noise in large metropolitan areas. The work started with fieldwork in the Greater Bay Area, between the fishponds in the Pearl River Delta (Guangdong). With a computational method, the sound recordings have been analyzed, then handed to a group of professional singers, who interpreted the urban noisescape using their extended vocal techniques. In the exhibition gallery, from a series of hanging, outdated horn loudspeakers, the vocal snippets blend with noisy artifacts. LED screens form the backdrop to the hanging horns. In Idle Mode (Noise) presents a landscape in sound and visuals that is hybrid and ambiguous in many ways to produce a space of poetic reflection.
#Low Tech Sound
#High Tech Transcoding
15 horn loudspeakers, hanging from the ceiling, with cables and amplifiers; 15-channel generative sound, based on a fishpond recording reinterpreted by 7 singers; 3 low-resolution LED screens, 320 x 160mm; 1 low-resolution LED screen, 960 x 160mm; 4-channel generative video work, based on processed landscape panoramas
Production team: Yixuan Jin, Yujing Ma, Yaohan Zhang, Xuehua Fu, Hanyu Qu, Binghuang Xu, Zhaorui Lio (production); Binghuang Xu (desk research)
Singers: Zhang Waner, Xu Yuxuan, Zhang Han, Chen Caiying, Hou Mingrui, Xie Jiajun, Zhang Yujie
Thanks for support and inspiration: Xiao Jian, Xi Lei, Chen Dong, Jin Zhuosheng
Exhibited at Shunde Food Museum (Greater Bay Area), 2022; and at Wuhan Biennale, 2024-2025
High Sections / Low Leaps
Installation + Artistic Research
Speculative Urbanism between Low and High Tech
In collaboration with Zhen Wu, Tristan Braud, Sylvia Lee
2023-2024
This work is based on urban speculations inspired by the fast developing, fast-paced Shenzhen City in the Greater Bay Area, and more precisely, on a small neighborhood in its Longgang District far North of the center, which is currently undergoing urban development. This neighborhood, changing from farmland to a highly developed urban space in only a few decades, has inspired the artist to produce an art installation that uses an idiosyncratic mixed method involving custom-made sound design, AIGC, 3D modeling and rendering, simulation of the actual city, and a spatial installation setup with CRT monitors to reflect on potential and alternative futures of this neighborhood in a far distant time. The work reflects the relationship between construction noise, mechanical low-tech sound, urban development and so-called “high-tech parks.” The artist team presents a work that lets the viewer perceive a distant future through visual and sonic technologies. The key is that cities are increasingly technological, not only at their core of how they are built, maintained and controlled as “smart cities,” but also in the sense that humans who live, work and travel in cities use screens, earbuds, loudspeakers, cars and so on to navigate, use, and access the environment. This artwork posits that, in turn, these technologies and media change the ways in which humans perceive their surroundings – and AI as a novel form of mediator of existing content plays a crucial role in shaping contemporary human perception of the world.
#High Tech Cities
#Low Tech Sound
Production team: Zhen Wu (3d modeling), Tristand Braud (3d rendering), Sylvia Lee (AIGC), Minghim Tong (sound design), Zhaorui Liu (CRT shooting), Binghuang Xu (desk research), Yang Gu (assistance)
Exhibited at SeeD Pilot Project Exhibition, Shenzhen, 2023
A Grain Of
Series of Installations + Artistic Research
Rendering Shenzhen's Techno-Natural Materialities Audible+Visible
Enza Migliore + Marcel Zaes + Team
2022-2024
A Grain Of | Hybrid Matter (2022)
A Grain Of | Materializations (2023)
A Grain Of | Ambiguous Matter (2024)
“A Grain Of” is an ongoing technology-driven project that aims to read and sense emerging urban environments through their materiality, in the example of Shenzhen. The complexity of the city is rendered through conceptual manipulation of data collected over eight weeks of extensive fieldwork at three exemplary locations: a mountainous urban forest, an under-construction high-tech area on reclaimed land, and a densely populated, historical retail area. The collected materials, both physical and digital, show how the matter we live with daily are assemblages shaped by human, geological, industrial, and technological forces, characterized with the specifics of Shenzhen. The idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary approach allows this project to expand beyond physical matter to sonic, magnetic, vibrational, and digital artifacts. Interdisciplinary methods of speculative design and scientific data re-interpretation are then combined with advanced manufacturing and digital media technologies. To date, this project has resulted in two scholarly publications and three art installations, each of which marked with a distinct subtitle. The art installations aim at bringing the audience quite literally “into” a small grain of the city of Shenzhen, by rendering its materiality sensible on a micro scale. Thereby, the invisible, inaudible, and unnoticeable is augmented into a fictional display of the city’s smallest “grains.”
#Urban Matter
#Urban Sound
Production team and collaborators: Hanyu Qu, Yaohan Zhang, Yujing Ma, Yiyuan Bai, Bo Dong, Zhiyi Zhang, Zhaorui Liu, Minghim Tong, Simeng Wang, Xiaoyao Ma, Zichun Xiao, Zhonghui Tang
For more, see also the publication:
Enza Migliore, Hanyu Qu, and Marcel Zaes Sagesser. 2023. A Grain of: A Multimodal Representation of the City’s Ecology Through Material and Sound. In TEI ’23: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’23), February 26- March 1, 2023, Warsaw, Poland. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (doi)
Metric Displacement
Installation + Artistic Research
The Sound of Network Friction
Brian House + Annie Aries + Marcel Zaes
2021-2024
While Zoom and other online streaming platforms let us appear together online, the vast network infrastructure between us inevitably introduces delays, skips, and other temporal distortions. We usually try our best to ignore these shortcomings when we connect virtually, but Metric Displacement harnesses them instead in order to create unique rhythms.
This “site-specific” installation comprises three turntables streaming to an online meeting from three different locations spread out across the globe (Portland, OR; Bern, Switzerland; Shenzhen, China). Each turntable plays one of 18 looping lock-grooves on a vinyl record. The beat that results is unique for each listener who logs into the meeting because of the particular network conditions through which they are reached by the three streams. The piece runs continuously for a full week; as the grooves of the record begin to degrade, the artists in each location select new ones.
For more information, see “Metric Displacement: The Sound of Network Friction” in MAST, 2023 (publisher, pdf)
#Network Friction
#Low Tech Rhythm
First exhibited at Swissnex San Francisco, 2021. Presented at Geneva International Film Festival (panel), 2021; at NYCEMF New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, 2022; and at Musikfestival Bern, 2024.
Parallel Prints
Live Music Project
Experimental Electronic with Graphic Score
For Yarn/Wire, New York
2020-2022
Sequences of shaded color bars, coded in software, laid the foundation of PARALLEL PRINTS. Each member of the ensemble, for each rhythm fragment, picks a graphic sequence and realizes it against a metronome, by repeating subtle dynamic shades on a single pitch. This process, conceptual in nature, lends itself to iterations across any imaginable sound-making device or instrument, provided they allow the performer to craft subtle dynamic shades on pitched percussion. Its only requirement is that each fragment be played on a single sounding body. PARALLEL PRINTS thus creates space for negotiation in the moment of its realization, as four players closely gather around a single piano, an octave of crotales, or a tiny drum pad. Yarn/Wire demonstrated an unconditional commitment to experimentation across timbres and techniques as they fluidly moved between piano-based and percussion-based sound-makers. Their patience and persistence allowed me to spend an extensive amount of time with PARALLEL PRINTS; it enabled me to spend months, if not years, with the numerous fragments we had produced together – including the months of pandemic lockdown. The conversations with my collaborators deepened, for Yarn/Wire, Dykstra, and Backer encouraged me to take the original idea’s invitation for recombination and reconfiguration seriously. Simultaneously, Backer started shooting durational video footage in rural parts of the US, which she consequently processed with software code, constructing singular artificial composites out of a variety of durational videos. Artifacts of the process characterize her work, including the stills printed on this record. Inspired by my collaborators, after recording PARALLEL PRINTS #1 with Yarn/Wire on piano, we started capturing smaller fragments on drum pads where rhythmic data was recorded without sound, and we went on recording fragments of isolated sound on different instruments, so that endless permutations could be mechanically produced. PARALLEL PRINTS #2 I thus finished by writing software code that recombines the materials while rendering audible the computational processes themselves. Clicks, drop-outs and brisk decays suggest a sonic world that could never have been played by humans, and yet the present rhythms stem directly from Yarn/Wire’s performance. For me, the core of this work is constituted by humans who interact with a piece of conceptual technology. While necessarily some of the original idea was lost, these humans – my collaborators – have given rise to surprising and unforeseen nuances that characterize what PARALLEL PRINTS has grown into.
The record is available on Editions Verde (New York).
Premiered at The Stone at The New School, New York, by Yarn/Wire (2022)
#otherbeats
Web Installation + Artistic Research
Alternative Temporalities: Playing a Participatory Rhythm Archive
2020-2022
For #otherbeats, Marcel Zaes prompted contributors across the world to send him homemade beats, ‘alternative’ metronomes and skewed pulses, recorded from their shelter-in-place locations during the pandemic with lo-fi gear. This archive of rhythm collected via social networks is displayed in a web arts project: an experimental ‘space’ that lives on a website and makes sound.
The piece is involved with different notions of time grids. Using human data for an internet-driven sound project leaves the listener with an ambiguous sonic world that oscillates between periodicity, rhythmic deviance, and what might be called a defiant networked system of arbitrary connections. #otherbeats reflects on contemporary notions of ‘technological/techno’ and ‘organic,’ of ‘grids as resistance’ and ‘otherness,’ ‘broken’ and ‘failure.’ In particular it does so by referencing to the queer, African American musical undergrounds of the 1970s via its visual language. Thereby the piece acknowledges how deeply dance music rhythms are indebted to these scenes and pays tribute to them. Zaes, by way of designing ‘alternate’ systems of networked time grids, proposes an idiosyncratic mode of thinking ‘time grids’ in digital, networked electronic music performance. #otherbeats might be neither ‘techno’ nor ‘organic,’ but in fact, both.
The piece is made exclusively with Web Audio API/JavaScript under HTML5 and uses merely filtering, convolution reverb, synthesis, compression and live mixing as its techniques. #otherbeats takes on to democratize electronic music and sound art since it replaces expensive and specialized software at elite institutions with tools as cheap, ubiquitous and accessible as the web browser.
#Participatory
#Experimental Rhythm
#Online Sound Archive
Made in 2020 as part of the larger dissertation project “Resisting the Grid – Performing Asynchrony” by Marcel Zaes at Brown University, Providence RI, USA.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.
Co-authored with all the contributors who have made their location audio recordings available for this project.
The Last Place (Left)
Live Music Project + Music Tech Setup
Hybrid Instrumental + Technological Timbre
With Katryn Hasler (strings) and Florine Juvet (accordion)
2011
“THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is a fragile sound world which moves familiar things into a surprising light. The deliberate surrender of virtuosity and melody puts the focus entirely on the inner self of the sound and the rhythm patterns that are derived from prime number permutations. Subtly “handcrafted” electronic sounds mix inseparably with the baritone violin (low violin) and accordion, both instruments used here in a way that is reminiscent of synthesized sound. “THE LAST PLACE (LEFT)” is at the same time machined poetry and at times a groovy sound world, a richly composed sonic matter oscillating between ambience and beats, realized with advanced music technology, yet implemented all in real-time, on stage.
The record is available at Tonus Music Records.
This project was extensively toured between 2008 and 2012 all over Europe.