Sound art and attentive listening to nature in Hong Kong: Retuning with ecology under the sonic turn

Placing my feet carefully on a pictogram comprising ‘ear-marks’ – two ears positioned like shoeprints within a circle – spray-painted white on the red-tiled pavement, I sat down on a wooden bench in front of a small bookshop in Cheung Chau Island to immerse myself in the experience of Otodate (点 音) (see Figure 1). Created by a Japanese pioneer of sound art, Akio Suzuki, after his informal performance for the Listening Academy Hong Kong in November 2024, Otodate invites attentive listening. ¹ I closed my eyes to allow other senses, hearing in particular, to override my customary reliance on a visual analysis of the surroundings. At the narrowest part of the island, the sounds of bustling everyday life created a fascinating sonic environment: the primary school bell ringing, waves breaking on Tung Wan Beach, fishermen preparing their boats amid bird calls at the harbour on the other side of the island, deliveries made to nearby restaurants, people chatting away and riding bicycles, and prayers recited amid the incense smoke in the street shrine to my left.

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Figure 1.

Akio Suzuki, Otodate (2024) on Cheung Chau Island.

The richness of this aural panorama gained through listening carefully, composed a mesmerizing mix of human-produced sounds (anthrophony), biological sounds (bio-phony), and non-biological sounds of the natural world (geophony). ² Inspired by John Cage and his ‘chance listening’ or listening-as-acceptance, Otodate was developed by Suzuki to denote the process of listening to the sounds of an urban environment. The concept literally combines ‘sound’ and ‘point/mark’, and is a wordplay on nodate, an elegant euphemism for an open-air tea ceremony. Since the earliest series of Otodate created in Berlin in 1996, Suzuki has painted dozens of them in several cities across Europe and Asia. In 2010, as part of the second Around Sound Festival and Retreat, also organized by soundpocket, Suzuki positioned 15 Otodate mostly on Hong Kong Island but also in Kowloon and on Lamma Island. ³

Since the 1960s, Suzuki has explored the relationship between sound and space. Although he is best known for performances on echoes, echo points, and his original analogue sound instruments, Otodate shifts agency to participants by inviting attention to the often underheard sonic elements of one’s surroundings. At its core lies Suzuki’s ongoing inquiry into how urban soundscapes – and especially the way sounds resonate across surfaces and objects – can help us re-examine and reconstruct space. As a multisensorial experience that occasionally includes humorously selected locations, Otodate highlights how auditory events are socially, culturally, and ecologically situated. Even if its primary intention is to make us listen, for Suzuki Otodate is a musical work functioning as a score: a site where people pause, listen, and compose with their environment through their own modes of attention. ⁴ The simple but effective white design resembles official road markings and appropriates their affective authority. It signals what is possible: to stand still, to listen, and to be aware, particularly when these Otodate are found on busy streets or pavements. The tangible and intangible qualities of each site, combined with the listener’s own subjectivity, transform every encounter into a specific moment of situational awareness of one’s relationality with the surroundings. When created for workshops and festivals, and especially, in pairs, Otodate also invites shared experiences often in transcultural settings and even across national borders. This visual motif of ‘footsteps as ears’ foregrounds an aesthetics of attentive listening and, more importantly, an embodied multisensory engagement with the surrounding environment.

Suzuki has participated and performed in all Around Sound Art Festivals and co-hosted one in Amino in Japan in 2014. ⁵ His works have inspired some key figures in the sound art scene of Hong Kong while also elucidating the often overlapping and indistinguishable trajectories of sound, performance, music, contemporary arts, soundwalks, listening, nature, and a variety of environments from highly urbanized to abandoned villages and seaside. ⁶ Consequently, Suzuki’s work offers an intriguing starting point to examine how Hong Kong-born or Hong Kong-based artists have engaged with nature in the predominantly urban practice of sound art.

Building on ecocritical theory and drawing upon my research on artistic and creative practices in Hong Kong’s public spaces since 2012, this article investigates how nature informs and infiltrates sound art, its strategies and practices. In light of the growing interest in acoustic ecologies in art, I take field recordings and direct engagement with natural soundscapes as the point of departure. What kinds of natural sounds intrigue artists? What relational, compositional, interventionist, or participatory tactics do they employ? Do they reveal ecological concerns or promote conservation? Through selected works by pioneering sound artists such as Edwin Lo Yun Ting, Cédric Maridet, Wing-ka Kwong, and Fiona Lee Wing Shan, alongside more recently started or relocated artists represented by AK Kan Hei-chun and Ryo Ikeshiro, this article demonstrates that recordings of natural sounds and soundscapes have an important and varied role in predominantly urban sound art in Hong Kong, and the modes of engagements have further diversified through recent virtual exhibitions and on-site engagements.

Intersections of sound/sonic, music/art, and environment/ecology

The rise of interdisciplinary sound studies, which examine sound, sonic practices, silence, and listening in relation to sociocultural histories, diverse forms of sound production and media, as well as both traditional and contemporary soundscapes, has enriched the significance of sound both as a lived experience and as a focus of scholarly debates. ⁷ Although views differ on when the ‘sonic turn’ was first introduced, research employing and theorizing sonic methodologies has gained increasing attention beyond ecology, musicology, and media studies, extending more broadly to cultural studies, anthropology, heritage studies, urban studies, and the natural sciences. ⁸ In doing so, sound studies have expanded and significantly reshaped the social sciences and humanities.

Because sound is inherently relational and affective, it is a fundamental element in how we make sense of the world – how it is constituted, structured, governed, experienced, remembered, and imagined. As Makis Solomos observes, sound manifests ‘itself as a network of relationships: to other sounds, to the ambient space, and to the subject who listens [italic in the original]’. ⁹ Similarly, Salomé Voegelin emphasizes that sound is not only ‘the invisible layer of the world, that shows its relationships, actions, and dynamics’, but ‘in its sticky and grasping liquidity there is something that augments, expands and critically evaluates how we see the world and how we arrange ourselves to live in it’. ¹⁰ As Richard Chenhall and colleagues propose, to extend beyond the communicative and symbolic functions of sound, it is important to ‘hear the layers of historical meaning, embodied action and situational affect associated with sound in our everyday environment [italic in the original]’. ¹¹ Sounds and soundscapes contribute to the notion of acoustic identity of places, communities, cities, and cultures.

Foregrounding sonic investigations provides new avenues for rethinking both past and present cultural, social, political, and environmental practices in ways that textual or visual analysis alone cannot capture. For example, studying how sound was employed for national health and safety during the pandemic, and how it (mal)functioned to facilitate and reinforce authority, provides novel insights into forms of governmentality that are not confined to visual representations or written slogans, but are instead enacted through sonic acts with both nationalizing and localizing effects in China. ¹² In a similar vein, examining the interplay between sonically mediated recreations of ‘nature’ as instruments of a civilizing and acoustic discipline, and ‘grassroots-based assertions of personal space and sonic agency’, illuminates how ‘the negotiated “wholeness” of a space’ is co-produced through relational sonic practices in Chinese scenic sites. ¹³ Furthermore, identifying which soundscapes enhance the sense of place in historical and cultural areas, such as Taiyuan, is critical to understanding how sound conveys memories and emotions, and contributes to cultural heritage value. ¹⁴

These kinds of new dimensions of cultural and sociopolitical patterns and their spatiotemporal transformations can be revealed by investigating a broad spectrum of sonic practices, ranging from oral storytelling traditions, chanting, music-making, and sound art to industrial soundscapes, public announcements, and broadcasting histories. Focus on sound offers novel epistemological and ontological frameworks to re-examine the connections between the tangible and intangible aspects of any given society, capturing the temporal, spatial, and affective modalities of everyday life, acoustic practices, and human–non-human interaction within the world.

While this sonic turn consolidates sound as a legitimate area of research and opens intriguing possibilities, it also introduces new challenges for studying sound within the realms of contemporary arts and music. Sound is inherently a multifaceted and multimodal phenomenon, deeply intertwined with past and present sound-making and listening practices, as well as their evolving contexts. Although the significance of sound in exploring interconnections and hidden dimensions has been long recognized by musicians, composers, and artists, the recent surge of interest in sonic investigations has reformulated the ways contemporary arts, music, and listening are understood, along with their roles as methods of research. ¹⁵ Beyond its expanded interdisciplinary scope and the abundance of theoretical frameworks that sound studies introduce, another practical challenge is the intriguing yet intricate constellation of concepts, many of which are often used either in contradictory or overlapping ways. Over the past two decades, interest in creating and studying sound within experimental music-making and contemporary arts has intensified. ¹⁶ Despite this growing attention – or maybe, because of it – the distinctions between music, sound art, and other visual or media arts remain highly contested. Sound art is often understood as a form of contemporary art and as an umbrella concept encompassing ‘any artwork that makes use of the idea of sound, the experience or perception of sound, the physical effect of sound, or the residual traces of sonic activity as its primary material, and does not fit squarely within the confines and traditions of existing artistic genres’. ¹⁷ Consequently, not all music, media art, installations or performative practices can be considered sound art but the criteria between these categories remain ambiguous.

In a similar vein, perceptions of sound/sonic and art/music in Hong Kong and in the region fluctuate, and some prefer not to distinguish between sound, music, or art. For some, sound art includes a range of electronic and experimental music, while for others, experimental music-making encompasses sound art. ¹⁸ Some prefer to focus on sound within contemporary art. ¹⁹ A fourth perception, based on Trevor Wishart’s approach, suggests sonic art as the more holistic approach, denoting a wide spectrum of artistic practices: ‘it is used not only as a synonym for electroacoustic music, but also includes live electronics, soundscape composition, noise, sound in contemporary art – such as sound art, sound installation and sound sculpture – and finally, sound in conjunction with other media such as film and video, in multimedia or media art’. ²⁰

Another conceptual framework, sound practices, has gained currency as a more holistic perspective encompassing both music- and art-making. It is developed most extensively by Danyang Yraola in her doctoral thesis examining sound practices in Hong Kong and Manila. Writing from the combined perspectives of practitioner and scholar, and drawing on Julian Steward’s cultural ecology approach, Yraola traces the histories of sound practices within the intersections of new forms of arts and music that have emerged since the 1980s. ²¹ In doing so, she proposes the conceptual framework of sound practices to highlight their entangled histories, current conditions, and their organic yet distinct tendencies in relation to other forms of arts and music. Yraola clusters together ‘sound art, electronic music, experimental music, noise music, and any other creative form that falls between the interstice of music, visual, performing and media art, among others, that shares a sense of community, manifested in their projects and other platforms of production’. Sound practice denotes ‘a grouping of practices engaging with sound [as] medium or subject, sharing practitioners, histories, spaces, resources, and other aspects of production, dissemination and consumption of their art.’ ²²

Given that a wide range of artists, musicians, composers, curators, and researchers have used diverse methods to explore the significance of sound, sound practices appear to be a more balanced and locally grounded approach that does not subordinate music to sound art or sound art to music. It also offers new possibilities for future analysis of a broader spectrum of sound-based contemporary arts which are often discussed within other conceptual frameworks due to the rather segregated and individualized scenes of experimental music and visual/media arts. For instance, art projects that engage with local or migrant communities through singing as the main medium of an artistic strategy, such as the Complaints Choir Hong Kong (香港投訴合唱團, 2009–11) and Zhen Bo’s Sing for Her (2015), have previously been examined as participatory or socially engaged art, rather than as sound art or music-making. ²³ Because of their inclusiveness, sound practices are gaining ground as a feasible conceptual approach among Hong Kong-based sound scholars. ²⁴

In her detailed study, Yraola provides an invaluable analysis of the ecology of sound practices, where ‘ecology refers to the relationship between sound art practitioners and other agents in a particular environment or field’. The ecology of sound practices is further discussed through key aspects, including, but not limited to, sites, ethics, technology, and in the context of the contemporary art world in Asia through a transnational, comparative approach. ²⁵ However, a more extensive contextualization of these creative sound practices within other sonic practices and engagements, including those that are not made as art or musical expression, remains largely absent. In the light of a broader perspective of sound studies that examine human responses to sounds and soundscapes across different kinds of acoustic environments in Hong Kong, ²⁶ the importance of a more nuanced approach to ecology becomes evident.

While an emphasis on cultural ecology and human agency is understandable from the disciplinary perspective, this kind of focus appears somewhat limited given how growing ecological awareness and ecocritical theories have fostered critical reflections on human–nature relationships also in musicology and sound art. ²⁷ In the past decade, at the confluence of the ecological turn and the sonic turn, an increasing number of artists worldwide have found it meaningful to address pressing environmental issues, such as climate change, through sound. Conceived as ecological sound art by Jonathan Gilmurray, this growing movement of the 21st century comprises works informed by ‘an active engagement with contemporary ecological issues’. For instance, listening to sounds of an ecological phenomenon or an environment is used as a method to foster a deeper ecological understanding. ²⁸

Even if Yraola mentions acoustic ecology and field recordings in her research, these do not seem to be acknowledged as a substantial form of sound practices of the Hong Kong scene. For many sound artists, working with field recordings across diverse environments – from urban and suburban settings to uninhabited and underwater sites – is an essential method in their works both materially and conceptually. Moreover, the creation of sound-based works situated within a range of environments, together with practices such as participatory soundwalks, workshops, and other forms of engagements that prioritize listening to the surrounding environment, has constituted a defining programmatic focus of soundpocket since its establishment in 2008. As one of the most influential non-profit organizations supporting sound-based artistic practices in Hong Kong, soundpocket has been acknowledged for its significant role in shaping the field. ²⁹ Numerous events and programmes that incorporate environmental listening alongside other artistic practices have also been organized by a range of institutions and through cross-institutional collaborations for various purposes, including those with educational aims. One such example is ‘The Third Space’, initiated by Asia Art Archive. Its inaugural winter camp was held in Sai Wan Village, Sai Kung, in 2015. Led by sound artist Fiona Lee Wing Shan, designer and urban farmer Michael Leung, and artist Ng Ka Chun, the camp encouraged participants ‘to question and examine public space and civic culture, reflect on their relationships with the environment, and reconnect with nature’, through soundwalks, discussions, salt-making, storytelling, writing, performances, and improvised music-making. ³⁰

It is also important to recognize that music and the appreciation of nature have been historically and conceptually intertwined in East Asia. Attentiveness to sounds of insects, songbirds, and natural phenomena (e.g. rain and waves) has profoundly influenced contemporary approaches to sound and listening. Scholars of contemporary Japanese musicology suggest that a re-examination of listening practices of natural sounds together with traditional aesthetics could facilitate non-binary understanding and ‘a more ecologically viable epistemology of sound’. Through such an ecocritical approach to sound culture, James Edwards continues to demonstrate how post-natural noise music can be interpreted to refer to manmade noise pollution and its profound and distinctive capacity for environmental damage. ³¹ Could similar trajectories be relevant in Hong Kong?

In the mid-1990s, the urbanized quotidian soundscape was explored by Nelson Hiu, one of the pioneers of Hong Kong’s experimental music. Based in Hong Kong since 1985, Hiu is known for music improvisations with a wide range of instruments and sound sources. His album, Music for Roaches, Birds and Other Living Creatures, released by Sound Factory in 1995, comprises a series of brief improvisations performed on various flutes made of wood, bamboo, and clay, each tuned to non-diatonic scales. The album was recorded in a single afternoon at a modest studio in Yau Ma Tei, without signal processing to preserve immediacy and authenticity of the performance. ‘Rehearsed to the ambience of buses, cars, sirens, singing birds, dance class tambourines, mahjong tiles, Chinese opera and fluorescent light hum’, the structured yet minimal improvisations aimed gently to awake the often-neglected listener within ‘our daily high-tech, materialistic existence’. ³² Taking music as the method, Hiu proposes a mode of attentive listening, one that embraces the full spectrum of sounds and the acoustic interrelations of one’s immediate surroundings – which even in a highly urbanized and industrialized site and as an embodied experience indoors may be infiltrated by biophony and geophony.

The three decades between Hiu’s and Suzuki’s invitations to attentive listening have experienced a great variety of artistic, aesthetic, and musical practices investigating varying rhythms, tonalities, and patterns of human and non-human sounds in the surrounding environments, undertaken by musicians, composers, artists, sound recordists, and curators. Following the initial experimentation, particularly in experimental music, video art, multimedia art, and sound design during the 1980s and 1990s, new technological innovations, growing institutional support, and the enthusiasm of alternative and non-profit art spaces and music venues facilitated the further enrichment of these scenes, especially from 2006 to 2015. ³³ Despite increasing scholarly interest in the interrelations of sound, music, and nature in the region, ³⁴ many aspects of these diverse sound practices, and especially, their ecological and environmental dimensions, remain largely undocumented and unresearched in Hong Kong. It is beyond the scope of this article to offer a holistic analysis of the full richness of sound practices and their conceptual, material, and aesthetic connections to nature including, but not limited to, lyrics, materials of musical instruments, ambient compositions, and patterns or rhythms inspired by nature.

Instead, building upon the theories and methodologies of ecocritical art history and ecomusicology, this study investigates the multimodal and intricate human–nature interrelations in selected sound artworks and related curatorial practices. An ecocritical approach requires moving beyond the anthropocentric mode of humanities. It shifts from merely analysing the representations of nature towards critical investigation of the interrelations of human–nature–art/music by investigating the ethical, material, and ecological dimensions of artworks, music, and sound practices. ³⁵ Furthermore, as Karl Kusserow elaborates, ecocritical analysis ‘attends to environmental conditions and history and to considerations of ecology . . . engaging how humans have differently construed and been inflected by these things across time and cultures’. ³⁶ Applying these principles, I examine biological and non-biological sounds of the natural world (biophony and geophony) and how they are incorporated into sound art in relation to local and global environmental histories and changing ecological conditions.

The appreciation of nature through sound and recordings is rooted in acoustic ecology, which was conceived by Canadian composer, writer, and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer, who founded the World Soundscape Project in the late 1960s. ³⁷ As an inter-disciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their environment mediated through sound, acoustic ecology, and recordings of soundscapes have gained increasing attention since the 1990s especially in Japan and gradually more broadly in Asia. ³⁸ This has led to the tendency to perceive acoustic ecology not only as a method of documenting, analysing, and preserving soundscapes, but also as a means of promoting environmental awareness and conservation. While conceptualizations of acoustic ecology have evolved, new frameworks with slightly different emphases on sound as a tool for scientific research and monitoring have also been developed, such as ecoacoustics, soundscape ecology, and bioacoustics. ³⁹ For the purposes of this discussion, the key point is that despite their conceptual differences, these approaches share a focus on the importance of sound and field recordings for examining diverse organic and inorganic phenomena in changing environments as a form of scientific research. At the same time, they have inspired new forms of interdisciplinary collaborations for arts, science, and conservation. ⁴⁰

Human–sea interrelations

Although Hong Kong is a densely populated city, its territory comprises more water than land. Consisting of approximately 260 islands and a peninsula, it is defined by an extensive coastline. ⁴¹ The interaction between these environmental characteristics and Hong Kong’s history as an important port city across colonial and modern times demonstrates the significant role of the sea in shaping economic, sociopolitical, and cultural aspects of human life. An interest in human–sea interrelations explored through sound-based research has been one of the defining features of Edwin Lo Yun Ting’s versatile oeuvre. Growing up on Ap Lei Chau, an island once known for its fishing community and relatively unurbanized environment, Lo was surrounded by a soundscape shaped by the sea, seamanship, and a wide range of watercraft in all sizes and forms. As a student keenly interested in working on sound, he engaged extensively in making field recordings of diverse sounds and environments. The long seawall of the Aberdeen West Typhoon Shelter, however, became a central site experimenting with recordings and capturing the sounds of passing ships, interwoven with the shifting acoustic textures of the sea itself. Lo’s fascination with the sounds of the sea was further deepened by his father’s work as a captain on an oil tanker, and the stories he shared, reinforcing the younger Lo’s interest in sonic investigations of his own origins, experiences, and the characteristics of his surroundings. ⁴² This has led Lo to develop a series of conceptual examinations of seascapes through sound installations, performances, and exhibitions, many of which have been commissioned or displayed internationally.

For the first work of the Seascape series, Auditory Scenes: Tsing Yi (2009), Lo visited Wing Cheong Shipyard for a day in 2008 to record sounds, which he composed into a sound installation displayed in Hong Kong Sound Station group exhibition at Para/Site (Sound clip 1, Edwin Lo Yun Ting, Auditory Scenes: Tsing Yi (2009), Source: Courtesy of the artist, see supplemental file). In his next work, Auditory Scenes: A Study of Seascape (2009), created during a residency programme at Videotage, a Hong Kong-based video and new media organization. Lo expanded his sonic investigation of the seascape by following and recording the journey of the tanker travelling through several locations within Hong Kong’s sea territory. During his 10 days at sea, Lo experimented with different recording methods, including capturing underwater sounds of the seabed using hydrophones. While oil was being pumped on or off the tanker, the crew often had spare time which they filled by sharing experiences and joking in Cantonese. The seamen’s language and ways of speaking captured Lo’s attention, and he recorded and incorporated these human interactions into his work too. The third work, The Horizon of Seascape (2010), further expands the idea of seascape experienced from an oil tanker but reflecting Lo’s personal search for his own horizon within the seascape of Hong Kong. To contest conventional visual perceptions of horizon, and reconstruct it through sound, the work consists of a series of sonic fragments recorded during his sea journeys, arranged across eight horizontally aligned speakers. ⁴³

Seascape evolved through a series of methodological experimentations, engagements with seafaring and the ship building industry, and exhibitions (e.g. in Shenzhen and Shanghai). Its final phase, Auditory Scenes: Doumen was based on field recordings documenting the construction of a ship in the well-known shipyard in Doumen, Zhuhai, in 2013–14. The recordings were edited and composed into a vinyl record for Lo’s solo exhibition, Auditory Scenes: The Chronicle of Seascape, presented at a non-profit art space, 100 ft. PARK, in 2016. The exhibition displayed the full series of sound installations, performances, and albums created throughout the project. A collection of video and photographic documentation tracing the project’s varied phases, methodological approaches, and geographical recording sites was included to provide further contextualization of Lo’s reflections of his relationship with the sea. ⁴⁴

In the interview, Lo reflected how in 2010, when Chinese sound artist Dajuin Yao was invited by soundpocket, he proposed that the Chinese soundscape is deeply rooted in language and vibrant with human sound. During an art residency in Brunswick, Germany in 2011–12, Lo began to recognize how distinct the soundscape of Hong Kong is. ‘It is so intense,’ he noted. ‘It is a much more human-oriented type of soundscape.’ ⁴⁵ This realization shaped Lo’s approach further, heightening his interest in the significance of language and how it emerges from specific sociocultural contexts, formulating subjective perceptions of the seascape alongside personal memories and experience. ⁴⁶ In some individual works, the natural sounds are almost or completely non-existent, while differing sonic textures of machinery maintaining and operating the tanker predominate the compositions. Although addressing environmental concerns was not the primary intention of the artist, the series, nonetheless, reveals the considerable impact of industrial seafaring on coastlines and their ecosystems. This anthropocentric progress, in turn, provides the underlying rationale and context for human interaction and communication, shaping the perception of Hong Kong’s seascape, and highlighting the tensions between past and present sonic experiences too.

In 2014, Lo created a thematically related yet independent, site-specific sound installation Amino’s Seascape during the Around Sound Art Festival held in Amino, Akio Suzuki’s hometown in Kyotango City, Japan. Departing from the human-language and industrial seafaring-oriented soundscapes that had informed his Seascape project in Hong Kong, Lo became intrigued by the local coastal environment, the sonic character of which was shaped by smaller-scale human interventions, such as surfing and fishing, while allowing space for the subtler interactions of water, sand, wind, and other natural elements. Composed from recordings captured at beaches and ports of the area with a focus on sounds associated with the sea and shoreline, such as the cicadas at the seaside, underwater soundscape of the port activities, and the sounds of beach and tides, Lo formulated an abstract constellation of sound. The installation included a range of corresponding sonic textures and volumes, and a series of Fujifilm Instax Mini photographs documenting the recording locations. For Lo they represented ‘the environmental concert of Amino’s seascape’. ⁴⁷ By layering diverse auditory elements of geophony, biophony, and anthrophony, the installation can also be understood as conveying a multidimensional exploration of coastal co-existence in a less-industrialized setting.

In Hong Kong, Lo continued his exploration of underwater recordings which led him to experiment with sound in a new way: to create sound installations in the context of performance. This new series, titled The Gestures of Seascape (2015–17), activated the underwater recordings through the use of glass plates and sound transducers. By creating immersive seascapes that both intervened in the space and introduced an element of unpredictability, Lo also challenged himself to listen and to interact with the sounds as they unfolded. The series comprised two performance-installations at the Karin Weber Gallery in 2015 and two site-specific sound interventions on the rocky shores of Ap Lei Chau in 2016. The latter incorporated recordings from Amino as a tribute to Akio Suzuki and drew inspiration from Rolf Julius. The Ap Lei Chau performances can be understood as part of the experimental trajectory that culminated in the exhibition Traces and Scenes at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago in 2016. Organized as a multimedia three-part essay, the exhibition pays homage to Suzuki and extends Lo’s exploration into performative installation with the subjects of seascape, memory and sonic experience. The exhibition opened with a performance of Gestures of Seascape, integrating the accumulated sonic explorations of the series into a single, immersive presentation.

For Lo, outdoor performance offered a particularly suitable method to explore seascapes, and the shores of Ap Lei Chau provided an ideal location. Through these performances, he sought to merge the presence of nature and his ‘artificial’ sounds, projected through transducers and glass plates, to create a holistic auditory experience for the audience. At the time, Lo was not explicitly aware of post-humanist debates on the human–nature relationship and from his perspective, the performances were inclined to resonate with a traditional Chinese artistic sensibility, in which the artist or poet seeks ‘to dissolve oneself into nature’. He identifies with this sensibility and further explains his aim to explore how ‘the performance itself dissolves into the on-going flux of nature’. ⁴⁸ Situated within Lo’s versatile oeuvre, encompassing multiple conceptual strategies related to sound, these works shaped by the human–sea relationship reveal two principal yet shifting trajectories in his sound-based practice: from less urban to highly urban contexts, and from language-based to non-language-based engagement, across which the presence and infiltration of natural sounds vary. In doing so, Lo’s oeuvre resonates with Voegelin’s perceptions on how sound not only reveals dynamic interrelations but also enriches and critically re-evaluates how we position ourselves in the world. ⁴⁹

Viewed from the ecocritical perspective, while the Seascape series, rooted in a tanker’s perspective, presents anthropocentric and fossil-fuel-driven views of the sea, Gestures of Seascape shifts the perception to underwater soundscapes and non-industrialized seashores offering an alternative perspective through its more direct engagement of the natural environment and its invisibilities. Taken together these two series elucidate the possibilities of sound, field recordings, and sound art as an interrelated dynamic, relational, and spatial method to examine and engage with the different existential perspectives, environmental histories and ecologies, implicating a shift towards a more ecologically informed approach in relation to Hong Kong’s geographical distinct features.

Perceptions of bees and other living creatures

The multiplicity of different perspectives and forms of existence in the world shaped by environmental histories and natural science is one of the core themes examined by Cédric Maridet. Having lived in Hong Kong since 1999, Maridet began making sound recordings around 2003, initially capturing the creaking of bamboos on Lamma Island. Through his engagement with music and explorations of recording tools and techniques, he became increasingly interested in the heightened environmental attention that sound recording enables:

When you record, you really listen. You try, in many ways, to shut down your other senses. Photography didn’t offer me that same intensity of focus, so I shifted toward sound as a more inherently temporal and durational medium. I became interested in that specific mode of being within an environment. I was drawn to the connection and attentiveness that the act of recording demands. ⁵⁰

Working with sound, enabled by various microphones and recording technologies, functions as a method of inquiry, providing a means to explore and think through alternative, non-human perspectives. The solo exhibition Distinct Factures, at the 2P Contemporary Art Gallery in October 2012, represents Maridet’s multimethodological approach and includes two artworks based on field recording of natural sounds. The exhibition draws on his experiences in the rainforests of Brazil and Penang, Malaysia. During an artist residency at Mamori ArtLab – directed by Francisco López and situated in the Brazilian Amazon – Maridet became captivated by the acoustic intensity of the rainforest. This engagement was further developed during another informal residency in Penang, where his conceptual approach was further shaped. As a result, the exhibition adopted the framework of a cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer), transforming the gallery into what was described as ‘the invisible heuristic journey’. ⁵²

While informed by historical intersections of science, language, and semiotics, the exhibition was grounded in conceptual, methodological, and indexical approaches to sound and its relationship to empirical inquiry into the physical environment. The term ‘facture’ draws on Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of the sound object (l’objet sonore), understood as a perceptual unit of sound considered independently of its source and defined by its qualitative and temporal characteristics. In the context of the exhibition, facture ‘refers to the energetic and material mode of production of a sound object, the gesture or mechanical action that imprints itself on the sound as a perceptual trace’. ⁵³ It is manifested through the gestures of writing, recording, and reading that serve to translate meanings that remain open or limitless. The exhibition space itself is conceived as a void in which historical hypotheses can be questioned and different signs may interweave, generating the possibility of an as-yet-unknown extension of perception and experience. Thematically, the exhibition critically re-examines the colonial and extractivist practices of natural science by taking the work of Hercule Florence, an artist, who attempted to document environmental phenomena during the Langsdorff Expedition (1826–9) as a point of reference. Florence, a pioneer in developing notation methods to represent the vocalizations of organisms before the invention of sound recording, inspired Maridet to examine historical strategies and their limitation for capturing both visible and intangible sensory experiences, as exemplified in his use of sonograms and the act of recording. ⁵⁴

The recordings captured in Brazil were integrated into an audiovisual kinetic installation, The Mechanics of Shadows, Selva Days. To create an artificial ecosystem, four robotized turntables played a record, each with distinct sound recordings assembled to evoke a circadian cycle: the calls of morning birds, the rhythmic buzz of cicadas in the afternoon and early evening, the voices of nocturnal frogs, and underwater sounds from the Rio Negro. The installation draws on the history of sound reproduction, referencing the phonograph as a technology that has long mediated our engagement with sound, shaping particular aesthetic sensibilities and forms of listening through the acousmatic condition it produces. Because the records are acetate dubplates, they are slowly destroyed by the touch of the needle while the sound machine operates, and the documentary status of the original field recordings shifts. This gesture features the impossibility of compiling or preserving a complete archive. ⁵⁵

The interplay between sound’s tangible and intangible materiality, loss, and absence are further examined in The Soft Science Cabinet (Apis cerana). This sculptural installation consists of a sound composition (’35) and stainless-steel-and-glass cabinet containing dead bees, honeycomb, hive residues, petri dishes, and two long-playing records made of beeswax and engraved with sound grooves. For this work, Maridet made new field recordings of bees on Lamma Island. ⁵⁶ The installation pairs these sounds recorded from inside a beehive with spoken excerpts from ethologist Karl von Frisch’s study on bees and their communication. In doing so, the work refers to the early development of ethology initiated by von Frisch, who examined the expressive capacities of bees and the possibility of an abstract, non-human language. The work is further informed by Jacob von Uexküll’s theory on Umwelt, suggesting that the perception and experience of the surrounding world is shaped by different capacities of a specific organism of a species to sense and perceive. The understanding of parallel, distinct perceptual realities offered Maridet a more direct framework ‘to consider the material, biological, and ethological dimensions of how bees orient, communicate, and inhabit a reality radically different from ours’. ⁵⁷ To create the beeswax LPs, Maridet first pressed a standard vinyl of his field recordings and made a silicon mould of it, which, in turn, was used to cast the records in beeswax. Both the choice of material and the gesture reference early recording practices, notably the all-wax phonograph cylinders developed by Thomas Edison in the late 1880s. The beeswax records are intentionally unplayable, and since they are made of organic material, they will gradually decay. ⁵⁸

By producing this unplayable archive of sounds of the Asian honeybee (Apis cerana), the work highlights both the possibilities and limitations of achieving more-than-human perceptions, as well as the impossibility of fully representing them in any scientific or non-scientific methods. While the bees’ sounds were part of the sound composition played in the exhibition, the notion of inaudible or silenced sounds, represented by the beeswax LPs, draws attention not only to the declining populations of honeybees but also resonates more internationally to ecological conditions, reminding us about Rachel Carson’s study of silenced ecosystems of insects affected by pesticides. ⁵⁹ The biodiversity loss taking place across the world is inevitably reshaping the soundscapes too: breakdown of acoustic niches and reduced acoustic diversity lead to biophonically impoverished soundscapes. In this context, acoustic ecology and especially, the recordings of natural sounds and soundscapes are gaining increasing interdisciplinary significance and value. ⁶⁰ For Maridet, as he further elaborated, in relation to the specific mode of attentive presence with an environment that field recording manifests, ‘recording becomes what Bernard Stiegler describes as a sensitive, mediated practice of the world: a renewed practice of listening that is vital today, when our experiential relations with diverse ecological worlds are steadily eroding’ [italic in the original]. ⁶¹

Sounds of nature at the intersection of preservation, conservation, and sustainability

The significance of field recordings of nature has been recognized by other artists too. In 2015, a special feature on sound and ecology was produced by artist Wing-ka Kwong for the Library, soundpocket’s online platform. Growing up in a farming village, Ma Shi Po, in the northeastern part of Fanling in the New Territories, Kwong became aware of the differences of the soundscapes between the rural and urban areas since his childhood, and how his own experiences were defined by playing and learning in nature: ⁶²

Through the sounds of nature, we can hear the communications and habits of animals while at the same time, collect information about their habitats. To someone like me who grew up in a farming village, the sounds of nature remind us of the change of seasons. ⁶³

Since 2012, recordings of natural sounds have served as both inspiration and material for Kwong’s artistic practice, although since 2021, his focus has shifted towards installations, land art, and sculptures. Currently, Kwong considers himself as a person working in the natural environment, to whom sound or listening practices are one of the mediums or methods through which he aims to document his experience in nature. Over the years he has made a vast collection of sound recordings of natural sounds and soundscapes across Hong Kong, some of which he has also shared through soundpocket’s website. In a series of recordings, 24 Solar Terms (二十四節氣), Kwong follows and shares the seasonal changes, from Spring Commences to Frost, through 14 sound recordings (Sound clip 2, Wing-ka Kwong, Vernal Equinox (2013), Recorded at the Ng Tung River Tributary, Source: Courtesy of the artist, see supplemental file). ⁶⁸

For a major part of his artistic practice, Kwong has worked with different mediums and methods, combining sound, projections, photography, and organic materials, to elucidate the significance of nature. Investigating the relationships between humans and Hong Kong’s precious subtropical environment, while also uncovering the spirits, traditions, and sociocultural practices that used to shape the pace of daily life in response to seasons, has been a defining element of his oeuvre. For Kwong, recording natural and rural soundscapes is to preserve them, to write the history of the place. Over time, however, exhibiting sound in a gallery space no longer felt like the right form through which to encourage environmental protection, because it does not provide the holistic experience of being in nature. ⁶⁹

Doing field recordings in nature was an initiative for AK Kan Hei-chun too. His project ‘AK in KK – Nature Field Recording’ started as a university project in 2016 with 10 recordings, evolved and featured a sound map and a library in 2018, and was officially launched on 12 March 2019. In 2020, the project was awarded a grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, which enabled him to hire five assistants, each of whom produced five recordings. Originating from serendipitous encounters with mountains and sound, ‘AK in KK’ was initially a web-based project, dedicated to capturing and engaging with natural sounds and soundscapes through listening (Sound clip 3, AK Kan Hei-chun, Recording of spotted black cicadas whose calls symbolize the arrival of spring, recorded in March 2019 at the Peak, Source: Courtesy of the artist, see supplemental file). ⁷⁰

At the outset, Kan had no prior scholarly knowledge of ecology, biology, or the scientific applications of sound. However, he became fascinated by the concepts of acoustic ecology, soundscape ecology, and the distinctions between geophony and biophony as described by Bernie Krause. Kan is aware of the research potential of field recordings, as well as the quantitative and qualitative requirements necessary for recordings to qualify as scientific contributions. Since 2021, Kan has participated in artistic events and hosted workshops on invitation from various institutions. His practice has shifted from producing field recordings for the sound map online to exploring the methodological and conceptual possibilities through sound performances, installations, and walks through direct engagement with audiences in situ. Although Kan acknowledges how definition of sound art remains controversial and how his practice originated from field recordings as a form of documentation and sound-mapping, he now identifies as a sound artist:

I found sound art as a comprehensive medium for presenting field recording. The field recording here is not simply meaning the recordings, i.e. the files, but also the process and the emotional experience during the process by the field recordist. Doing field recording itself, is already a practice of art. . . . The whole process involves a lot of choice and interpretation from the artist, and this is definitely an artistic practice. ⁷¹

Since it was initiated, AK in KK has expanded and become a project that represents Kan’s efforts to bring field recordings into the realm of sound art. In turn, sound art serves as a framework and a platform for presenting these natural sound investigations and expanding them to examine forms of active listening together. Transforming field recordings into experiential site-specific forms of sound art allows Kan’s practice to connect more immediately with listeners and invites them to find their own yet shared experiences of listening. In 2023, AK in KK launched a project titled ‘Seek Quiet as Fog’ which extends the original aims of reconnecting and reflection even further. By employing ‘fog as a metaphor for listening’, the project invites audiences ‘to become fog together, and search for natural quiet from ourselves’. ⁷³

Even if Kwong and Kan differ in their views on how and to what extent sound or field recordings constitute artistic practices, they share a passion for preserving nature and inspiring people to appreciate it. Both emphasize the personal experience of nature, achieved through attentive listening and being fully present, as a meaningful way to engage with the environment. Intriguingly, like Kwong, Kan observes that despite the gorgeous natural sites of Hong Kong, they remain largely segregated from the urbanized patterns of daily life. Because sound art is closely connected to everyday life, and contemporary lifestyles are predominantly urban, sound art practices tend to focus primarily on urban soundscapes.

This focus on attentive listening to predominantly urban soundscapes is present in Fiona Lee Wing Shan’s oeuvre, though her works are also permeated by the presence of and interest in natural elements. As early as 2014, Lee perceived listening as an important way to connect with the world and to be present in a moment. She furthermore expressed an appreciation for sounds from nature while acknowledging how ‘she is addicted to the noise in the city in certain ways’. ⁷⁴ This ambivalent auditory sensibility still motivates her ongoing exploration of the relationships between different dimensions of sounds and soundscapes. Lee’s earlier projects were often informed by an interest in physical phenomena and electromagnetic sound, in capturing and reproducing inaudible, high-frequency sounds using vortex coils. Over time, however, her practice has expanded to encompass soundwalks, performances, and other participatory formats that explore how sound interacts with space, memory, neighbourhoods, and embodied experience. Her methods have shifted, particularly in light of her recent research into naturopathic therapy and healing arts. ⁷⁵

An attentive, shared listening in the rural environment of Tai Sang Wai was organized as part of the Fishpond Canteen Sustainable Art Festival 2020–2021. Resident artists, including Lee, regularly explored the site to produce works informed by fishpond aquaculture, ecosystems, and food production. As Lee travelled between Tai Sang Wai and the urban areas, the differences in ways of living and thinking became increasingly evident to her. This stark contrast in worldviews within the same city prompted her to reconsider the principles of ecosystems and what might constitute genuine ecological conservation: ‘Perhaps, the preservation of micro-ecosystems within ourselves is a necessary prelude to safeguarding the broader environment.’ ⁷⁶

As a result, Lee conceived Wandering (游漓, 2021), a sound performance based on a multimethodological collaboration. To offer an alternative perspective on the rich vitality and biodiversity of the village, Lee began by exploring its characteristic soundscapes and their diurnal variations through field recordings in selecting and deciding the duration, route, and the timing of the sound walk. By listening to and interacting with the soundscape shaped by ecological activities and villagers’ everyday rhythms, the sound performance encouraged attendees to attune to the acoustic environment of the fishponds. Lee installed small devices in the pond to spout and purl water to underscore the fishpond’s water as a source of life in the local ecosystem. The listening experience was further enriched by choreography performed by Sabrina Wong. Her movements interacted and navigated through sounds created by Lee with instruments and everyday objects, and surrounding elements (e.g. vegetation), inviting the attendees to visually engage with the environment too. This multisensory participation was expanded through a workshop in which attendees created small instruments designed to imitate birdsong and then play them together around the fishpond. ⁷⁷

By offering an embodied and immersive experiment situated within fish farming, aquaculture, and food production, Lee’s collaborative sound performance foregrounds the multi-dimensional and complex questions surrounding sustainability of diverse human–non-human interactions and their co-existence. If considered in relation to Kwong’s and Kan’s commitments with natural sounds and soundscapes, Lee’s work reveals the potential tensions at the intersection of nature preservation, ecological conservation, and the challenges of multi-species inhabitation amidst ongoing urban development in Hong Kong. Taken together, the aesthetic sensibilities and artistic practices of the five artists discussed demonstrate the richness of sound, field recordings, and interactive listening through their varied approaches inserted in seascapes, shores, mountains, villages, fishponds, forests, and gallery spaces. In doing so they not only substantiate Leah Barclay’s propositions regarding the interdisciplinary value of acoustic ecology in understanding the changing environment and enhancing environmental engagement, ⁷⁸ but also extend and enrich the significance of attentive listening. The expansive methodological possibilities of sonic inquiry which were demonstrated through a range of situated and embodied practices elucidate how natural sounds and soundscapes – whether experienced in situ, through field recordings, or as a combination of these and other artistic methods – can serve as a powerful tool for investigating existing value systems, worldviews, and the frictions that emerge within or between them.

Towards planetary connectedness through virtual convergences

The outbreak of COVID-19 necessitated the adoption of new modes of communication, including scholarly exchange and exhibitions on sonic practices, ecology, and art in Hong Kong. Amidst continuing fluctuations in social-distancing regulations, in February 2022, the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong hosted ‘Data Art for Climate Action’, a hybrid conference accompanied by an art exhibition curated by Ryo Ikeshiro and Lina Simon. Originally conceived and set up as an on-site show, the exhibition was reconfigured as an online gallery, featuring both the individual works and a 360-degree virtual environment. DAT/ACT Data Art for Climate Action Gallery foregrounded the engagement of artists with climate change through the use of data as artistic material, in particular, through visualization and sonification. The interpretative ‘act’ invoked by the exhibition was extended to viewers/listeners, who were encouraged to reflect upon and form their own positions within the interplay of sensory affect, climate data, and their broader ecological and societal implications. ⁷⁹ The exhibition, comprising artists from Asia, Europe, and North America, presented a diverse array of artistic approaches and, to some extent, appears to have encouraged local artists to engage with data sonification for the first time.

Another transnational lineage of virtual artistic and cultural exchange, employing field recordings and listening as methodological framework, was initially offered by ‘Sound Envelope HK-LDN’, as part of the SPARK 2021 Online Festival, supported by the British Council. Created by Ryo Ikeshiro and Tom Tlalim, with Dawn Scarfe and András Blazsek, the programme foregrounded attentive listening to everyday sound environments in Hong Kong and London, two historically connected cities. A diverse group of residents and students from both cities created and shared field recordings, from which each participant produced a soundscape that was presented in a virtual exhibition, still accessible online. According to the curatorial statement, ‘The act of listening attentively whilst recording, playing back and mixing field recordings can make one attuned to subtle variations in our everyday sound environment, and become receptive to those of others.’ ⁸⁰ Whereas these predominantly urban soundscapes were primarily shaped by human-made sounds – including music, public announcements, conversations, bell tolls, traffic, and construction noise – natural elements were also incorporated into some works, such as the rustle of bamboo, birdsong, cicadas at sunset, and sound of water (fountains, waterfalls, and ocean) recorded in Hong Kong, establishing a dialogue between the urban and natural acoustic environments.

This collaboration led Ikeshiro and Tlalim to extend the practice of attentive listening across national borders in a virtual and physical exhibition as part of SPARK 2024, the British Council’s festival of ideas. Titled Listening to the Earth: Sonifying Planetary Health Ecologies (October 2024), the virtual exhibition moved beyond anthropocentric notions of health and wellbeing, emphasizing the interconnectedness of human health and environmental ecosystems. ⁸¹ Through discussions with participating artists and organizers, the artworks gradually evolved. Some drew inspiration from prior works involving field recordings or sonification, while others developed new works or collaborations specifically for the exhibition. Certain artists were already engaged in projects addressing environmental or climate concerns, whereas others were cultivating emerging interests in these areas. A central aim of the project was to expand the notion of sonification and listening beyond scientific research into the realm of artistic practice, recognizing its independent aesthetic and conceptual value. Here, listening encompassed not only engagement with field recordings of natural sounds but also a heightened sensitivity to one’s environment and being. This broader understanding highlights the dimensions of listening to foster awareness and reflection on human–nature interrelations within the planetary perspective. ⁸²

Exhibiting sound in a gallery setting in Hong Kong presents significant challenges. Most spaces are not equipped to meet the technical, spatial, material, and acoustic requirements of sound-based artworks, and the sonic intrusions of traffic, construction, and industrial soundscapes are often unavoidable. As Ikeshiro, an artist, musician, and researcher, based in Hong Kong since 2020 elaborated, these overlapping sounds in a physical gallery can generate a compelling mixture that becomes a significant element of the exhibition itself. At the same time, the online gallery, where viewers can navigate, control, and focus on a single work at a time, offers what Ikeshiro considers an ‘idealized setting’. ⁸³

Although individualized listening to an artwork in the virtual realm eliminates the possibility of an embodied shared listening with others in-situ and the direct relation to the physical natural environment, it can facilitate alternative forms of connectivity and collaboration. Framed by Barclay’s argument that listening to changing environments, whether in situ or through virtual and creative interpretations, can cultivate interconnection and empathetic responses extending from local communities to international ones, ⁸⁴ these virtual exhibitions, accessible from different parts of the world over an extended period of time, provide a feasible opportunity to foster such connections.

While the three exhibitions co-curated by Ikeshiro thematically varied from everyday environmental soundscapes to climate action to planetary health, they share a notion of reciprocal interrelatedness between humans and environments through sound practices and listening, rooted often in field recordings some of which include natural sounds. These online exhibitions and their associated programmes, which included international participants and audiences, offered new platforms for artistic exchange and served as sources of inspiration not only for Hong Kong-based artists but also more broadly across the region.

Reverberations

The power of sound resides in its evolving multidimensional relationality and in its ability to evoke new associations, recollections, and insights about the intricate relationships existing in the world. As these artists’ practices and perceptions demonstrate, sound emerges through reciprocal interactions not only with other sounds and the acoustic qualities of the surrounding space, but also with the biosphere. The significance of sound is further co-constituted in the act of listening, in which listeners’ mnemonic traces, perceptions, knowledge, value systems, activities, and multisensory embodied experiences all contribute to the unfolding of the auditory encounter. If we accept Gilmurray’s proposition of ecological sound art, then by enabling audiences to hear ecosystems and forms of life that typically lie beyond the limits of human perceptual abilities, sound works can be understood as strengthening an ‘ecological mode of listening’. This kind of orientation to listening attends to the vibrant interrelations of ecological processes and, in doing so, nurtures a heightened ‘sensorial awareness of the principles of the interconnected ecosystem’. ⁸⁵ The ‘retuning with ecology’ that I propose, however, is a more holistic and complex process.

At first glance, working with urban environmental and anthrophonic sounds – including electronic sounds that are generated or processed digitally through software to create abstract, immersive or musical compositions – appears to dominate contemporary sound practices in Hong Kong. Attention to Cantonese and street sounds is considered a distinctly local feature of sound art in Hong Kong. ⁸⁶ A third characteristic is sonic investigations of urban constructed spaces (e.g. staircases, piers, and tunnels) and their architectural reverberations. While the presence of such ‘urban soundscapes’ is evident, I propose that sound art is epistemologically, ontologically, and axiologically more diverse, transcultural and ecologically embedded in relation to nature and natural sounds than has been recognized to date.

Perceived through an ecocritical framework that considers human–nature interrelations and the importance of field recordings of natural sounds and soundscapes, it becomes clear that sound art in Hong Kong involves the complex and fluctuating coexistence of human, urban, rural, and natural sounds. In doing so, it resonates with the aims to formulate not only ‘a more ecologically viable epistemology of sound’, ⁸⁷ but also a more ecologically connected ontology and appreciation of sound practices. By closely analysing selected works, series, and exhibitions by sound artists and situating them within related programming and curatorial practices, and ecological conditions, key aspects that inform the interrelations between sound art and nature emerge. I refer to these as dimensions of retuning with ecology in Hong Kong.

Firstly, the concept of retuning denotes the acknowledgement of the significance of natural sounds and soundscapes (biophony and geophony), and the act of listening to them. As argued in the field of soundscape ecology, natural sounds not only represent the planet’s acoustic biodiversity, but also serve as ‘our auditory link to nature’. ⁸⁸ In this context, the notion of retuning foregrounds the aesthetic significance of natural sounds within a wide spectrum of artistic practices, including music, poetry, literature, the visual arts, and, more recently, sound art – evident not only in Hong Kong but throughout the wider region.

In a parallel manner, sound artists have been intrigued by natural sounds and soundscapes beyond national borders and through field recordings. The interrelatedness of sound art and nature in Hong Kong is shaped by transnational practices and transcultural approaches. From its early days, artists and musicians born and educated elsewhere relocated to Hong Kong, some of whom have had a significant impact on the unfolding local scene. Furthermore, internationally recognized sound artists and musicians from other parts of Asia, Europe, and North America have frequently been invited to participate in sound events that also take place in less- or non-urban settings and their specific soundscapes defined by biophony and geophony. In addition, local and locally based artists have undertaken residencies both in the region and in other continents and these experiences have clearly shaped their understanding of diverse acoustic characteristics and intensities, and using field recordings made elsewhere in their practices rooted in Hong Kong. The recent virtual exhibitions and collaborations online have further enhanced the international tendencies of retuning with varied transcultural ecologies.

Retuning sonic experiences and investigations reveal a remarkable diversity of biophonic and geophonic field recordings. Defined by islands, shorelines, mountains, woodlands, and grass/shrublands, Hong Kong’s biosphere is a rich set of ecosystems that support substantial biodiversity and create a vivid spectrum of natural acoustic elements. Across the territory, water appears in multiple forms and motions: waterfalls, flowing streams, tidal surges, breaking waves, underwater currents, and rain, all contributing to a distinct auditory character of Hong Kong. The city’s mountainous terrain and sub-tropical climate, together with the seasonal arrival of numerous migratory bird species, further shape the natural acoustic diversity. These conditions generate a wide variety of natural sounds, including the rustling of bamboo groves, leaves on trees, and grass, the pulsating drone of cicadas, the gurgling of frogs, and an ever-changing chorus of birdsong, among others. Agricultural and aquacultural practices introduce additional layers, such as the buzzing of bees, and the subtle, rhythmic ambience of fishponds. These sounds and their tonalities are captured in field recordings and further conceptualized in works ranging from those created and presented only in situ, stored in virtual databases, or presented at exhibitions. Besides capturing, documenting, and sharing the sounds of nature through a great variety of aesthetic strategies, and for different conceptual aims, by exploring these natural sounds and how they shape worldviews, the artists discussed are providing an alternative, ‘less urban’ understanding of Hong Kong. Given the predominantly non-urbanized land area, surrounded by larger water areas, this less anthrophonic perception retuned with ecology is more closely aligned with the territorial reality and its ecological conditions. At the same time, these works invite us to inhabit this more-than-human environment.

As discussed by sound artists, attentive listening plays a significant role in engaging with nature. This practical aspect of retuning can take many forms both in-situ in nature as well as in gallery spaces. Creating field recordings, however, provides a distinctive mode of co-existing. Advances in microphones and recording equipment allow artists to capture aspects of the changing environment that would otherwise remain beyond human perception. Interest in such practices in Hong Kong appears to be growing, as evidenced by recent exhibitions and events. Because sound enables ‘embodied sensory engagements with a place and time’, environmental sounds, in particular, foster interconnectedness and encourage environmental engagement. ⁸⁹ In Hong Kong, groups and collectives of people from diverse professional and creative backgrounds, ranging from nature enthusiasts and media artists to farmers and environmentalists, have incorporated sound and sound art into collaborative projects and festivals. In this context, field recordings and attentive listening offer ways to explore ecological and climate-related concerns.

Furthermore, as Voegelin articulates, the imaginary force of the sound art ‘presents the phantasm of the real world and lets us inhabit it as the world of “what could be” or indeed of “what is” if only we listened’. ⁹⁰ The shift in emphasis from visual aesthetic to sonic agency requires sonic sensibility. This emerges through a subjective, reciprocal, and temporary ‘affective engagement’, building a ‘contingent world’ from the invisible processes and connections between visual elements of the sound artwork. ‘Accessibility’, Voegelin further elaborates, ‘the notion of what is actual and what is possible, is not an external predetermined measure, but is a contingent and fluent production generated in the action of listening’. ⁹¹ When a sound artwork is understood ‘as environment, as world’ it invites the listener to engage perception as an act of immersion and inhabitation. Immersion in the temporospatial expanse of the work enables listening as a continuous movement of centring, decentring and recentring. This dynamic mode opens possibilities for auditory imagination to move beyond representation and fixed truths, creating instead a generative and participatory field of re-examination. ⁹²

While Voegelin concentrates on unravelling the interactions between an individual listener, sonic materiality, and the visual elements of sound artworks, focusing primarily on compositions and site-specific sound installations, the practices of contemporary sound art are far more diverse. A more nuanced, ecocritical understanding of how a wide range of intangible and tangible materialities, processes, sites, and performative activities function as integral components of a sound artwork’s aesthetic composition highlights their capacity to inspire ecological attentiveness and appreciation. For instance, interactive audience participation, the use of organic materials, fragrances, shifting temperatures or humidity levels, and gradually transforming sound-production methods may all be employed to contribute to the spatiotemporal complexity of sound artworks. Furthermore, when working on sounds of nature through field recordings or at the natural sites, sound artworks foster forms of attentive listening that enable new modes of knowledge, learning, empathy, and engagement. Such retuning shifts cognitive approach from isolated sound events towards an understanding of sound as embedded and a co-constitutive factor of Earth systems.

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