Stranding

Soprano Sheng, Piano, Percussion & Electronics | 2026

Selected work, Call for Interactive Media Works, Yao Yueh Chinese Music Association
Premiered – Hong Kong, 8 August 2026, The Hall, East Kowloon Cultural Centre

Program Note

Stranding builds an asymmetric sonic ecology of whales, humans, and machines, using the rhythmic grammar of sperm whale codas as its thread. A struck anvil opens the work: the human presence arrives first, and a synthesizer modeled on coda rhythm and pitch answers in the whale’s own syntax. The sheng, present only as breath and air-tone, aligns itself with this synthetic voice. An archival hydrophone recording enters next and answers nothing; it exists as recorded fact, indifferent to the dialogue staged around it.

The three voices overlap and diverge across the piece’s six sections, moving from mimicry toward a middle passage where the sheng’s breath-tone is pitch-shifted and granularly resynthesized through the same processing chain applied to the whale material, at which point the distinction between “human imitating whale” and “whale material processed like any other” stops holding. What follows is not resolution but stranding: the anthropogenic noise layer, sourced from underwater industrial and sonar textures, takes over as the earlier rhythmic grammar dissolves, before a return to unprocessed piano and a single bell tone that echoes the opening anvil, the only sound in the work not derived from another source.

Throughout, the dialogue stays asymmetric. The human reaches out; the whale’s voice remains partly beyond comprehension; and once run through the same signal chain, the three agents become technically indistinguishable, even as the piece insists on their narrative difference.

Stranding developed out of Whale Echo Dialogues, a multi-agent interactive installation built around the same three sonic agents, documented in a paper published in the proceedings of ARTECH 2025 – 12th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts , held in Braga, Portugal, November 26–28, 2025. That version placed the synthetic whale under audience gesture control and let a machine listening system supply the archival voice. The concert version fixes the electronics to the visuals, and in doing so puts all three agents through one shared processing chain. The full paper is listed on the research page.

Credits

Composer: Yu-Chia Kuo
Interactive Media Artist: Sin-Yu Deng
Soprano Sheng: Wong Ka Tai
Piano: Alex Kwok
Percussion: Colin Chow
Performed by: The Hong Kong Legends
Artistic Director & Conductor: Leung Chi-cheung
Concert Producer: Tak-Cheung Hui
Performance Photography: YYCMA
Presented by: Yao Yueh Chinese Music Association
Supported by: The Yao Yueh Chinese Music Association Limited is financially supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Concert Information: art-mate.net/doc/97424