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About the Taiwan Modern Sound Culture Database

Origins

Taiwan’s modern sound culture has been a core research focus of TheCube Project Space since its founding. Beginning in 2010, TheCube began systematically organizing a series of “Sound and Era” lectures and publications, inviting scholars, artists, and writers from related fields to speak and perform. The initial results of this work were presented in stages: in 2011, through the exhibition The Heard & The Unheard (curated by Amy Cheng, Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale); in 2014, through the exhibition Altering Nativism: Exploring Post-War Taiwan Sound Culture (curated by Ho Tung-Hung, Amy Cheng, and Jeph Lo, presented at MoNTUE and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts); and in 2015, through the publication of the eponymous book (co-published by TheCube Project Space and Walkers Cultural Enterprise).

Although the Altering Nativism exhibition and book have mapped out Taiwan’s modern sound culture to a considerable degree, we believe that the narrative it presents is neither ultimate nor singular — it can be reconstituted from multiple dimensions to offer multiple ways of seeing, paths of understanding, and processes of dialectical inquiry. The Sound Traces — Taiwan Modern Sound Culture Database website project was initiated with this in mind. We aim to share as openly as possible the materials collected between 2010 and 2014, and we hope this database can provide researchers interested in this subject with a methodology and a tool — and further serve as a driving force to advance the future possibilities of Taiwan’s sound culture.

If you have any feedback about this website, please write to us at: info@thecube.tw.

I. What is “Modern Sound Culture”?

Sound culture scholar R. Murray Schafer described the sounds of the modern world in the following terms:

“Originally, all sounds were original. Sound could only exist in one place at a time. Therefore, a sound was tied to the mechanism that produced it. The human voice could only travel as far as the sound could carry. All sounds were unique and unrepeatable. […] Since the invention of electrical means of transmitting and storing sound, any sound, no matter how tiny, can be sent out around the world or preserved for future generations on disc or tape. We have separated the sound from the mechanism that produced it. The sound has been torn from its natural insulation and amplified into an independent existence.”
— R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (1977)

Modern listening has become almost entirely detached from natural sound. We listen through radio, television, records, the internet, amplifiers, loudspeakers. Between original sound and listening lie radio waves, inscribed grooves, and digital signals — with the intermediate processes of recording, modulation, and storage that constitute “sound-making.”

This database project focuses on the culture produced by these processes, as well as the cultural, political, economic, and social contexts that generate them.

II. Why Focus on “Modern Sound Culture”?

Sound culture theorist Brandon LaBelle argues that the knowledge of listening is an epistemologically radical mode of penetration — one that reveals “events in time-space in which sound opens up an interactive field, becoming a channel, a state of flux, and a constant transformation between opinion and advocacy, musical performance and theatrical staging, interaction and sharing.” This mode of knowing is fundamentally different from seeing. The resonance sound produces within individuals — or its phenomenology — makes it a vital alternative method for understanding social conditions, for sound “places us within highly dynamic and energetic environments, just as auditory phenomena often contain the possibility of transcending the limits of conventional modes of representation.”

From the “organization of sound” to the study of sound culture — that is, sound’s constitutive significance within society — this is in fact a more totalizing and extensible field, connecting human behavior and ecology to community, urban environments, social systems, and sound’s various applications as medium. The character of sound also expands its reach from sound itself into an immaterial space and ecology. The omnipresence of sound frequencies — much like the human auditory mechanism — means we are perpetually immersed in all manner of “soundscapes.”

As a method for understanding society, sound culture finds a concrete example in French historian Alain Corbin’s historical study of listening in public space. Corbin meticulously examined the culture of bell-ringing in 19th-century France: in the aftermath of the Revolution, the meaning of bells shifted with social transformation. Disputes surrounding what was then the loudest sound in the landscape were always about the power to control it — how it was rung, why, when, and by whom. From state to church, local to central, the struggle over the control of sound embodied the political power shifts of the era.

Princeton University history professor Emily Ann Thompson further analyzed the relationship between the American soundscape of the 20th century and the interfaces of modern architecture and technology, explaining how invention enabled human intervention in and control over the expression of sound in public space. She notes that “reverberation” is an acoustic character of space and architecture; but in modern architectural thinking, reverberation became a “noise” to be controlled and eliminated through technology — replaced by a demanded homogeneity of reverberation across every corner of urban space, thereby erasing the distinctiveness of each place’s soundscape. “Noise,” in this context, is perhaps better understood as a form of “social negotiation” around survival and audition that arose from the mechanical sounds of daily life and the invention of new technologies — as well as the process and outcome of the resulting political distribution of aurality. In other words: the birth of a modern society, whether in sound’s essential nature or in its social meanings, also begins with the differentiation, regulation, and control of “noise” and “non-noise” — and thereby reflects the corresponding social institutions and normative processes of modern sound and listening.

Artist Chen Chieh-Jen has also proposed the notion of “memory reverberation”:

“Our memories are not only incapable of being complete, but in the process of reconstruction and ‘re-narration’ within each person’s mind, there inevitably exist phenomena of addition, deletion, rewriting, and fabrication — of ‘re-translation’ and ‘re-imagination.’ Therefore, when audiences attempt to recount films they have ‘seen’ and ‘heard,’ what they describe is already a film that has passed through their own ‘re-translation’ and ‘re-imagination.’ Furthermore, in terms of the physics of sound, any sound once produced — through continual refraction and reflection — does not disappear into silence, but continues to diffuse in frequencies our ears cannot hear, and in the form of ‘reverberation.'”
— Chen Chieh-Jen, “Image and Sound: ‘From Reversal to Qualitative Change in Action'” (2011)

That is to say: all the past events, actions, and thoughts of sound culture leave layer upon layer of traces — like “reverberations” — in our present sonic institutions and new creative works. Energy does not vanish. It never disappears.

III. Taiwan’s Modern Sound Culture

This database project takes “reverberation,” “noise,” and “modern space” as both metaphor and epistemological model, examining Taiwan’s history from Japanese colonial rule through the periods of martial law and its lifting to today’s globalization. More precisely, the project seeks to trace how Taiwan’s modern sound culture has been constituted through the dialectical trajectory of “the control of sound” and “the resistance of noise,” and what kinds of “reverberations” have been left behind in “modern space.”

The database adopts a chronological timeline as its primary mode of presentation, categorizing historical events under “Media / Publication,” “Politics / Society,” “Technology / Culture,” and “Space / Performance.” In addition to events, works, activities, institutions, and figures related to modern sound culture, it encompasses related developments in politics, economics, culture, and thought from other domains. Beyond chronology and category, the database also uses “keywords” as links between events — each keyword’s connected events constituting a possible historical perspective and narrative.

Team

  • Production: TheCube Project Space
  • Director / Editor-in-Chief: Jeph Lo
  • Executive Editor: Sun Yi-Chen
  • Phase One Research Editors: Sun Yi-Chen, Liu You-Yi
  • Website Design: Teng Chao-Min
  • Special Thanks: DJ @llen, Victor Cheng, Wang Geng-Yu, Wang Fujui, Wang Ying-Fen, Wang Mo-Lin, ET@T, Chu Yue-Xin, Ho Tung-Hung, Ho Ying-Yi, Wu Zhong-Wei, Li Ming-Cong, Lin Chi-Wei, Yao Da-Jun, Yao Jui-Chung, Hu Zi-Ping, Fan Yang-Kun, Ling Wei, Eric Scheihagen (Hsu Jui-Kai), Chin Cheng-Te, Chang Yu-Zhang, Chang Chao-Wei, Hsu Heng-Wei, Hsu Kuo-Long (Ku-Sang), Chen Jia-Qi, Chen Po-Wei, Chen Chieh-Jen, Yu Wei, Huang Sun-Quan, Huang Kuo-Chao, Yeh Hsing-Jou, Yannick Dauby, Tsai Cheng-Chung, Cheng Keng-Zhang, Ying Wei-Min, Lo Song-Tse, Guan Yu
  • Sponsored by (2016 Edition): National Culture and Arts Foundation, Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government
  • Sponsored by (2026 Revamp): Live Forever Foundation