December 4th-6th, 2020

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A three-day digital conference, keynote speakers and guest artists will share with international audience with paper presentations and workshops from a wide variety of interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives, focusing on innovative sound-based projects that address environmental awareness and engagement to realize sound-based initiatives that facilitate new artistic connections with the natural world, or to address - directly or conceptually - pressing environmental issues.

Reimagining Nature through Music

Paper Presentation by Dr CHEN Zhangyi, Assistant Professor of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, National University of Singapore

Friday, December 4th, 2020 | 2:15pm - 2:45pm 

Dr. Chen Zhangyi, constantly explores the musical possibilities of Singaporean culture and heritage. With librettist Jack Lin, they created Laksa Cantata, Window Shopping, and Kopi For One, which form a chamber opera cycle A Singapore Trilogy (a L'arietta production), and was lauded as one of the best classical events of 2018 by Straits Times. His fusion concerto - Triple Concerto (三人行) for erhu, ruan and percussion was performed on YST Conservatory Tour to Seoul (KNUA) in 2019, led by British conductor Jason Lai. Nature forms another source of inspiration in Chen's music. For instance, orchestral works Rain Tree (Tokyo Philharmonic, SSO), Vanda (Kam Ning and Darrell Ang/SSO), and Of An Ethereal Symphony that was commissioned by SSO for their Europe tour in 2016, led by Lan Shui. A Young Artist Award recipient (2014), Chen serves as Assistant Professor at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music. His Ariadne's Love was one of the winning works of the Abbey Road Studios Anthem Competition, recorded by London Symphony and Eric Whitacre Singers. (More Details)

Soundwise Talking: Values and Fun in my Sound-art-practices

Keynote presentation by Kaspar KÖNIG, sound artist, environmentalist, product designer

Friday, December 4th, 2020 | 3:00pm - 4:15pm

Next to lecturing and creating educational open research and teaching formats, Kaspar König's artworks advocate "creating momentum for social and environmental sense", in the realm of design and sound art. He is based in Zürich and in the Emmental in Switzerland. His works emit transitory holism by the means of sound, objects and performance; and invite the observer to reflect on the relationships of the local context and the universe. He is constantly engaging in academic dialogues and knowledge exchange with the Harrisons (Centre for the Force Majeure, Santa Cruz), Professor Braungart (the Cradle to Cradle Foundation), and engages in grass root movements such as Hackteria, Carbon Karma , Urban Street Forest and Share and Repair, to work together and design towards a positive footprint. Due to his interest and research in acoustic ecologies, König's works trigger sometimes a greater understanding of natural forces such as wind and water. In 2020, he gave lectures on " the sound of sustainable transition" at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in Germany. Since April 2018, König started to work as an artist for the rectorate at the University of the Arts, Zürich, and facilitate the sustainability dossier towards a fundamental academic strategy. Since the fall of 2017, he has been working as an interim Professor for sound art and composition at Hochschule für Musik Mainz. In the global pandemic, König seeks informal formats to create space and time in digital and analog media. (More Details)

Thinking Sound in Materials and Environment

Talk by Wen Chin FU, Artist and Musical instrument designer

Friday, December 4th, 2020 | 4:00pm - 4:30pm

Wen Chin Fu graduated in the Classical Music Department of Shih Chien University, Taipei in 2006. She continued her studies in the Netherlands, received a bachelor from the ArtScience interfaculty in 2010, the combined program by the Royal Academy of Arts and Royal Conservatory in the Hague, and later, the Music-theatre studies (T.I.M.E.) in 2018. Her interest is in exploring the relationship among physical movement, sound and the environment. She develops new instruments to experiment various possibilities of gestures, i.e, Body Cello, Spine Spinning, and finding new auditory possibilities within materials, i.e, Tang - musical instrument made of sugar and clay instrument with the mixture of clay and hay. A key element of her practice is the manner of concentration, which opens up possible senses perceiving objects in a new perspective. (More Details)

Deep Digital Listening: Free Floating in the Interconnected Soundscapes of the Participants

Workshop by Kaspar KÖNIG

Friday, December 4th, 2020 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm

This workshop is thought to benefit from the many "live" soundscapes there are.

Let's melt down our background noise, join the workshop without a webcam, together we co-create a unique virtual deep listening space.

Mixing and randomly occurring events now become part of the envisioning of where these sounds could come from. The Idea is to listen to the background of the environment and free it from the noise-cancelling software that suppresses your environment and sound typologies you are in. (More Details)

Next to lecturing and creating educational open research and teaching formats, Kaspar König's artworks advocate "creating momentum for social and environmental sense", in the realm of design and sound art. He is based in Zürich and in the Emmental in Switzerland. His works emit transitory holism by the means of sound, objects and performance; and invite the observer to reflect on the relationships of the local context and the universe. He is constantly engaging in academic dialogues and knowledge exchange with the Harrisons (Centre for the Force Majeure, Santa Cruz), Professor Braungart (the Cradle to Cradle Foundation), and engages in grass root movements such as Hackteria, Carbon Karma , Urban Street Forest and Share and Repair, to work together and design towards a positive footprint. Due to his interest and research in acoustic ecologies, König's works trigger sometimes a greater understanding of natural forces such as wind and water. In 2020, he gave lectures on " the sound of sustainable transition" at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in Germany. Since April 2018, König started to work as an artist for the rectorate at the University of the Arts, Zürich, and facilitate the sustainability dossier towards a fundamental academic strategy. Since the fall of 2017, he has been working as an interim Professor for sound art and composition at Hochschule für Musik Mainz. In the global pandemic, König seeks informal formats to create space and time in digital and analog media.

Listen to colors: www.listentocolors.net

For more upcoming programs, please visit https://asiasociety.org/hong-kong