Hearing Taiwan

After a series of loud beeps, the announcement “The car doors will now close” is broadcast in Taipei Metro stations shortly before a train departs. When thread crosses the skin during the beauty treatment known as facial threading, it makes a rustling sound. And then there is the music played at the beginning of TV news broadcasts. For Andrew Ryan, who comes from the US, these sounds constitute a novel and interesting way of seeing Taiwan.

Taiwan’s story in sound

Ryan came to Taiwan on a scholarship in 1996, and began to do academic research and study Chinese. He was recruited by Radio Taiwan International, where he became a program host in the English language service. The richness and variety of Taiwan’s soundscapes made him decide to stay.

Ryan has recorded everything from the sounds of divination blocks being thrown in temples to the noise of neighbors playing mahjong. As a program host, he came up with the idea for a segment called “Sound Postcards.”

During the one-minute segments Ryan would play a recording, and in his warm, gentle voice, share the story behind the sounds. For example, he recorded the rhythmic “tak, tak, tak” coming from a mochi vendor’s cart, and told the vendor’s life story through what he called “a sound to accompany broken dreams wrapped in sticky rice.” He described the scene of the old man making mochi by hand and related his hardworking life. The old man said with a laugh that he had been selling mochi since his youth, but he only got into this line of work because a friend failed to repay a debt. “Who knew back then,” asked Ryan with kindness in his voice, “that this sound of a spike tapping against a metal plate would become the accompaniment to his lifelong career?”

Many things from ordinary life in Taiwan, including the yueqin (moon guitar), facial threading, night markets, and cotton fields, have been rediscovered in sound by Andrew Ryan, making them fresh and interesting.

Andrew Ryan and visually impaired dancer Lin Xin-ting (left) traveled together by car, conveying the human warmth of Taiwan’s small towns to viewers. (courtesy of From Hear to There, Taiwan Public Television Service)

Searching for sounds with warmth

Ryan’s idea for “Sound Postcards” was to send out heartfelt greetings to distant friends. Later it was extended into a five-minute segment called “Ear to the Ground,” which introduced his life experiences in Taiwan in greater depth, revealing the sounds associated with matters that are very familiar to Taiwanese, such as facial threading, celebrations of the first month of a child’s life, and tourist buses.

He feels that foreigners can more easily see and hear things that Taiwanese themselves do not notice. “It’s not that the sound is unique; it’s just a question of when you listen, do you hear that warmth? Therefore my function,” says Ryan, “is to seek out the stories and warmth behind the sounds.”

If you listen closely to Ryan’s broadcasts or watch the travel program From Hear to There, which he hosted with two blind colleagues, you will feel a great sense of intimacy. This is because Ryan has never taken the role of bystander, for the sounds and stories in his programs all come out of his life in Taiwan. For example, when he attended the one-month celebration of the child of an indigenous friend, he recorded the expressions of congratulation spoken by guests in their mother tongue. In From Hear to There, he used his voice to describe the scenery as he drove his co-hosts all over Taiwan. When they entered an indigenous community to deliver food to elderly people, you could feel the human warmth of Taiwan in the elders’ conversations about the past in their mother tongue.

Ryan has long since come to consider Taiwan his home. Whenever he is returning from a trip abroad, he gets a strong sense of connection just by hearing travelers next to him speaking Taiwanese. And when he meets his friends—who are more like family—in the indigenous community of Pu­yuma (Chinese name Wangnan) in Taitung City, the sounds of them singing during the mangayaw hunting ritual are for him the sounds of home.

From making programs at RTI through his current job as deputy director of the News Center at Taiwan Plus, a video platform of the Ministry of Culture, Andrew Ryan has always been telling the stories of Taiwan. “I really like to listen, and I love to transform the warmth that I hear into warmth that others can feel too.”

The indigenous community of Puyuma in Taitung City is Andrew Ryan’s home away from home in Taiwan, with friends who are more like family. The photo shows him attending his nephew’s coming-of-age ceremony. (courtesy of Andrew Ryan)

Artist Wu Tsan-cheng has traveled all over Taiwan to record the soundscapes of various locations. He especially enjoys observing local development by visiting produce markets.

Social observation via sound

Through listening, we can discover the unusual amidst the ordinary. The artist Wu Tsan-cheng started the Taiwan Sound Map Project, and over the last ten years has collected soundscapes from all over the island. These include recordings from cities, farmland, lakesides, highways, and more. He has produced over 14,000 individual recording files and used them to create the website Sound Taiwan.

Wu uses audiovisual equipment to display the Taiwan Sound Map at exhibitions. He has even exhibited it in other countries including South Korea, Germany, Japan, and Spain. This summer he is at the Eleven Art Gallery in Taoyuan’s Longtan District.

Wu links the audio files in his database to locations on Google Maps, so that by clicking on the map in satellite view people can hear the soundscapes of different locales. He deliberately does not display place names and street names, so that people will click on unknown places as they search, and by listening can understand the soundscapes of novel environments.

Each time he arrives in a new place for an exhibition, Wu records the local soundscapes multiple times. When recording he emphasizes the environmental sound field and the permanent soundscape.

For example, the 11 Gifts for World cultural center is close to an army base where helicopters take off and land. However, during his first recording session Wu did not come across any helicopters. Thereafter he deliberately came in the evening and not only recorded helicopters but also discovered that loudspeakers in the local community broadcast music at that time of day. In the end he recorded birdsong, dogs barking, trash trucks, heli­copters, and the community loudspeaker music to document the varying sounds of nature and human culture.

When he comes to an unfamiliar city, Wu most enjoys recording at a produce market. For him, the fascinating thing about markets is that one can quickly understand the composition and lifestyles of the local population. For example, in today’s Taipei City, as a result of changing lifestyles almost all produce markets are now indoors.

Laila Fan invited sound engineers and ecological experts to together create the Taiwan Nature Sound Map website, to share Taiwan’s abundant and entrancing natural sounds.

Click on the red dots on the Taiwan Sound Map and you can immerse yourself in local soundscapes.

The boundless nature of sound

Wu states that the recordings he uploads must be sufficient to tell a story and there must be variations in the sound. If the sounds are very ordinary, such as in a produce market, Wu will imagine that he is on a movie set and that his audio recorder is a camera, with which he follows the movement of sounds. From this he can discover interesting storylines. At the Hsinchu Agricultural Products Marketing Center he recorded a vendor calling out in Taiwanese, “two for 30!” Wu smiles as he relates that not long after he had uploaded this to the website a foreigner messaged him to say how interesting the recording was, and there was even a Taiwanese dancer living in the UK who wanted to incorporate this sound into their choreography.

Wu, whose creative work is based on sound, sometimes will deliberately place his recording device on the ground so that sounds from a single location will produce different listening experiences according to the characteristics and positioning of the device. For example, when he goes to a river he will place the recorder on a rock in the middle of the waterway. When recorded in this way, the sound of flowing water seems to pour directly into the ears of the listener, who has the feeling of becoming that rock.

The Taiwan soundscapes that Wu records are also uploaded to the Radio Aporee website to be shared with listeners. Through the Sound Map one can travel all over Taiwan, and Taiwanese living abroad can relieve their homesickness by listening to his recordings. Netizens often contact him for permission to use his work. One foreign artist wanted to use his recording from a funeral to create a work of electronic music, and a Taiwanese girl in the US asked to use sounds recorded by Wu in an environmental education podcast. On several occasions online radio stations have broadcast excerpts from Wu’s recordings, including the sounds of a celebration at Taipei’s Dalongdong Bao’an Temple.

When asked what sounds of Taiwan he recommends that foreigners listen to, Wu suggests that early on a weekend morning they can go to Taipei’s Longshan Temple, where they will find nearly 100 elderly people chanting Buddhist sutras. The powerful combination of voices and faith makes for an intriguing soundscape.

Wu Tsan-cheng uses his Taiwan Sound Map to teach children to explore Taiwan.

Believers gather in Taipei’s Longshan Temple on weekend mornings to chant sutras. The vitality conveyed in their voices is striking.

Hearing the colors of sounds

In Taiwan, both in the city and in mountain forests the sounds of nature are always present. Recording engineer Laila Fan has promoted the establishment of the Taiwan Nature Sound Map on the website of the Soundscape Association of Taiwan to bring together field recordings made by other recordists across Taiwan, lifting the veil on these beautiful sounds for the general public.

The map displays pictures of all kinds of animals, and you can freely click on it to hear their sounds. You can also narrow down the selection by choosing what class of animal you want to hear, and the type and elevation of their habitat. You can hear snapping shrimp hunting on the sea floor off Penghu, as well as the sound of waves interspersed with the cries of seabirds on Dongsha Atoll. And you can feel the vitality of the Gongliao terraced rice fields in New Taipei City, expressed in the sounds of various species such as the Taiwan bamboo partridge, the grey-cheeked fulvetta and the temple tree frog (Kurixalus idiootocus), that gather in this place where environmentally friendly farming is practiced.

Every recording on the website includes notes from the sound engineer detailing what they saw and heard while making the recording, and their feelings about it. There are also species descriptions provided by experts, and photographs of the animals in their natural habitats, so that people can get to know the makers of the sounds even better. Fan hopes that with this kind of knowledge, people can get a better understanding of the natural world and take a greater interest in it.

The website also has a teaching resources section where Fan shares teaching guidelines and an education program that she has developed. She guides us all in using the site’s resources to help us open our ears, learn to listen to the sounds of Taiwan, and discover the joy and beauty of life.

Taiwan possesses great natural and cultural beauty. One way to appreciate this is through sound.

Laila Fan has spent many years making recordings in the field. She hopes to use sound to inspire the public to take a greater interest in nature.