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 stages an asymmetric encounter between whales, humans and machines, using the rhythmic grammar of sperm whale codas as a thread between imitation, memory and disturbance. Synthetic codas reach toward a non-human syntax, while archival whale recordings carry traces of their source as they are reworked into new sonic textures. Alongside them, the sheng moves between breath, pitch and gesture, forming a distinctly human voice within an ecology shaped by partial exchange.

As the work unfolds, these materials begin to approach, overlap and pull apart. Coda-like rhythms migrate into the sound of cracking ice, turning a language of communication into one of fracture. Sampling and granular synthesis draw whale recordings, instrumental sounds and environmental materials into increasingly porous relationships, while anthropogenic underwater noise grows from a peripheral disturbance into a force that unsettles the rhythmic grammar established earlier. The evolving sound world moves through imitation, interference and transformation as that grammar gradually loosens and disperses.

As that grammar disperses, these relationships take on a different shape. The archival whale voice persists within the work as both memory and material, while the boundaries between human, animal and machine-made sound continue to blur. Stranding leaves the listener within this shifting ecology, where fracture and disturbance continually reshape the terms of listening and communication.

Stranding developed out of Whale Echo Dialogues, a multi-agent interactive installation built around three sonic agents: a synthetic whale, an AI-modeled whale voice, and a layer of anthropogenic noise. The installation was 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. In that version, audience gestures shaped the synthetic whale while a machine-listening system generated whale-like responses from a corpus of recordings. Stranding reworks these ideas as a concert work for live instruments and fixed-media electronics. 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