Open Your Ears and Listen Anew

Lee Ming­­tsung, who began teaching the sociology of music at National Taiwan University in 2007, always starts the first class by telling the students about the concept of the “soundscape” proposed by R. Murray ­Schafer, the father of acoustic ecology. If we learn to listen attentively, we may have the opportunity to change the soundscape of the world.

In 2014, when Ko Wen-je became mayor of Tai­pei City, Lee, who is also a policy advisor to the Ko administration, raised with the city Department of Cultural Affairs a subject that, though small, was worth exploring in depth, and that the public could get involved in: the soundscape design of the Tai­pei Metro system.

Lee Mingtsung wants to use the redesign of the Metro soundscape to get the public to open their ears and listen anew. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Taking sounds for granted

The American sociologist C. Wright Mills proposed the idea of the “sociological imagination,” which is the process and effort by which each person connects their personal situation with public issues. Applying this concept to the Tai­pei Metro soundscape, Lee Ming­­tsung hopes that the public can reflect on whether or not there are things we take for granted in our shared public spaces, such as the warning sound for the ­Metro’s train boarding gates. When everyone assumes that high-­decibel sounds serve as a reminder to the visually impaired, they ignore the fact that for visually impaired people, who are more sensitive to sound than most of us, high‭-‬decibel sounds are even more intolerable. When we connect the personal situations of visually impaired people with the design of the public environment, this is an example of “sociological imagination.”

“This is a very small matter, but when we attend to these small details and differences to the fullest extent and in a culturally coherent way, then we are sure to rethink the relations between the individual and the environment,” says Lee.

Therefore the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation changed the harsh mechanical beeping of the card readers at the entry gates to the Metro system to a piano tone, thereby taking a small step in the direction of change.

The music created by Chang Chun-tzu for the Songshan Airport Metro station is richly futuristic, and envelops people in an atmosphere that makes one want to soar.

Starting from the details

But even changing just a single sound required a lot of work. The design team tried out countless adjustments to the frequency of the sound—it couldn’t be too high or too low—in order to find a note that sounded “pleasant” and “comfortable.”

The second movement of the Tai­pei Soundscape Program was to design music that would play each time a train came into a station on one of the four high-­capacity lines—the Tamsui‡Xinyi Line (the Red Line), the Bannan Line (Blue), the Songshan‡Xindian Line (Green), and the Zhonghe‡Xinlu Line (Orange)—with each line having its own specific music.

Red Line music creator Summer Lei used piano, guitar, and celesta to produce a melody that would take passengers from historic Old Tam­sui to the ultra-­modern Tai­pei 101. Ken Chou, meanwhile, took note of the artistic and academic temperament of the Green Line, adapting the main melody from a Chopin nocturne and injecting a little jazz flavoring to produce a soothing and enchanting passage.

Cincin Lee used the uncommon 5/4 time with a repeated piano melody to ease the agitated mood of people riding the Ban­nan Line, the ­Metro’s busiest, which runs from ­Dingpu to Nan­gang. George Chen, meanwhile, observing that the ­Zhonghe‡­Xinlu Line was mostly used by commuters, decided to adopt “a light and humorous melody that would relieve stress.” He used electronic tones to create a flowing mechanical feel and a magical musical style to accompany citizens as they go to work and return home.

The third movement in the Tai­pei Soundscape Project was melodies for use inside Metro cars to indicate interchange and terminus stations. The piano melodies created by Ken Chou, composed of sixteenth notes, not only remind people that they can change trains or have reached the final stop, but also give travelers visiting Tai­pei for the first time a refreshing feeling.

Next up came the most difficult task: the design of ambient music for the stations themselves. Each station has a different space, very disparate numbers of passengers, and differences in public address equipment; these are all challenges. Sound is invisible, and the task of making it just right—a quality sound that pleases the ear in an indefinably comfortable way—is full of devilish detail. To this end those involved in the project experimented with more than 100 combinations of volume, tempo, arrangement, instrumentation, and frequency, fine-tuning each aspect. These were all invisible efforts, and the goal was not reached at once, but required a slow, cumulative process accompanied by constant communication.

Emma Kao thinks of ambient music as similar to incense or perfume: it is intangible but can quietly change people’s moods.

Finding the greatest common factor

In the process of communication, of course public participation is indispensable.

Besides holding workshops, for the second wave of station ambient music the city government also solicited submissions from the public.

They responded with 447 creative works that came in from 12 countries and territories, offering music for the Dong­men, Long­shan Temple, Songshan Airport, Xiang­shan and Taipei Arena stations.

“Roaming Traveler,” which ­Chang Chun-tzu created for Song­shan Airport Station, uses two extremely simple sonic lines, coming and going like ocean waves, to symbolize a dialogue between expectations of a coming trip and ­memories of the past. It gives travelers the feeling of being enveloped in a fine mist, creating an atmosphere that makes one long to soar aloft.

Emma Kao has taken part in a lot of soundtrack work for domestic films. She feels that ambient music is like perfume or incense: it is intangible, but can quietly change people’s mood. The music she created for Xiang­shan Station employs plucked stringed instruments like guitar and mandolin. With repeated scales, plus layering and reducing techniques, she fills the station with relaxing and refreshing music.

Chang Yung-­chiao, who studied film score composition in San Francisco, used traditional Chinese musical instruments at which she is expert (including suona, gongs, cymbals and drums), and added the sound of an electric bass, to express the busy, crowded feel of a temple for Longshan Temple Station. Harvest Music Production head Mike Lin, who organized the selection project for Metro station ambient music and was also on the judging panel, argues that this piece is very elegant, that the instruments were used ingeniously, and that the piece shows a global outlook.

Musician Ma Yi­xian, who composed the music for the Tai­pei Arena Station, wanted to express the area’s busy, dynamic “urban spirit.” The materials he chose were sounds he recorded himself inside the station, such as human voices, footsteps, doors opening and closing, trains entering and leaving the station, and hands clapping. He made the rhythm the center and assembled other elements around it like a collage. It ended up being the most unusual of the five top selections, and it allows commuters to rapidly grasp the special local character.

Dongmen Station’s music was created jointly by musicians Yin Chen and Zero Hsu. Working with the themes of “bustling market” and “warm human sentiment,” they took the five-tone scale of Chinese traditional music as their source material. Yin’s expert erhu playfully circulates throughout the work, while Hsu, relying on his rich experience in film scores, added in Western orchestral music. The intermingling of old-fashioned and modern music symbolizes the energy of the constant interplay of old and new in metropolitan Taipei.

Besides soliciting works from the public and selecting their submissions, the real meaning of public participation was in listening to the opinions of users from all walks of life and finding the greatest common factor. For example, when the music for trains entering stations on the ­Zhonghe‡­Xinlu Line first came onstream, many citizens called Tai­pei’s 1999 hotline to protest, and netizens complained on social media that the music was weird, unsettling, or strange, or put them in a bad mood. But Lee Ming­tsung says this is a good thing. He is happy to hear different voices and see critical opinions appear, because this means that “people are starting to pay attention, because everyone is finally hearing, finally opening up their ears, and that’s what I really want.”

What kinds of sounds make up the Longshan Temple of your memories?

Open your ears and “hear” anew

The hope behind going to so much trouble to “redesign” the Taipei Metro soundscape was to get the public to open their ears and “hear” anew. But we wonder: Doesn’t hearing first require quiet? Why did they opt to add even more sounds to the environment? “My thought,” explains Lee Ming­tsung, “was to first add a certain amount, which would enable the need for subtraction to appear.”

For this reason, Lee repeatedly emphasizes that the main point of ambient music is the environment—to enable the music to blend into the environment, and not to produce a soundtrack for the environment. Ambient music should not interfere with the environment, but nonetheless should be distinctive. Its relationship with the environment is “inside the object and outside the object.” To put it more plainly, it is supposed to be “heard without being heard.” But this is a challenging concept for city officials under pressure to produce tangible achievements.

Compared to the visual cityscape, changes in the soundscape are more subtle and less easily noticeable. Moreover, the point of ambient music is to mix in with the environment, not to stand out, and Mike Lin says, “This program is really avant-garde.” Given that official evaluations of policy accomplishments emphasize that which can be seen, the city government could have more easily won plaudits by applying the funding to a program that would generate visible results. “But,” says Lin, “if we don’t do it now, we will have no chance to get ‘there.’”

But where is “there”?

It is an aesthetic of indefinable comfort, of being pleasing to the ear in a way that hits the Goldilocks spot, that creators—looking at things from the user’s perspective—arrive at by meticulously considering ­every conceivable tiny difference. It is a future in which extreme attention is paid to detail, in which culture is upgraded, in which the trend is toward refinement.

R. Murray Schafer said that our ears have no lids, so we are bound continually to listen, but that does not mean we have a pair of open ears.

Open your ears and learn to listen, wake up your senses. Starting from a single sound, together we can change the soundscape of Taipei!

Ma Yixian adopted the theme of “urban spirit” in the music for the Taipei Arena Metro station.

Dongmen Station offers an ambience that is both traditional and modern. The interplay of erhu and orchestra lends it even greater vitality.

Have you “heard”? The warning sound at the entry gates to the Tai­pei Mass Rapid Transit system has been changed to a pleasing piano note. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Mike Lin hopes that the public will learn to listen for sounds of quality.