Listening Room 2
Fixed Media: Program Overview
430-+
Ayako Sato
FMVP!
Guanjun Qin
Lunar Current
Chufan Zhang, Jun Wang and Qi Liu
Sawa
Akiko Hatakeyama
Take Me Back to Indonesia
Boyi Bai
Ventward
Ed Osborn
Woody
Adrian Kleinlosen
Zen to Hearth
Yu Linke
About the pieces & artists
Ayako Sato: 430-+
The fundamental pitch of the 15th bamboo tube of the Shō, “kotsu,” corresponds to the current standard pitch of 430Hz in Gagaku. This acousmatic piece involves listening to 430Hz, its harmonics, the sounds that deviate from it, and unreliable text about the Shō generated by AI. Perhaps.
Sho performance: DEGUCHI Miki
About the artist
Ayako Sato is a composer, musician, artist, and researcher working mainly in the field of electroacoustic music. Her works have been presented at international conferences and festivals (ICMC, SMC, NYCEMF, ISMIR, WOCMAT, etc.) and won awards in international competitions (Prix Presque Rien, Destellos Competition, International UPISketch Competition, etc.). She received her Ph.D. from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019 for her research on Luc Ferrari’s works. After working as a part-time lecturer at Tamagawa University, Osaka University of Arts, Tokyo Denki University, and Shobi Music College, she is a lecturer at Shizuoka University of Art and Culture starting April 2025.
Guanjun Qin: FMVP!
FMVP! is an electroacoustic composition built entirely from the sampled sounds of basketball — the bounce, the squeak of shoes, the swish of the net, and the roar of the crowd. Through sound transformation and spatial movement, the piece narrates the emotional journey of an athlete: from doubt and criticism to determination, and finally to victory. Dedicated to basketball legend Stephen Curry, FMVP captures the rhythm, intensity, and inner monologue of a player striving to redefine limits. Each percussive impact becomes a heartbeat; each layered resonance a moment of resilience. The composition explores how athletic struggle and artistic creation share the same pulse — persistence, precision, and belief.
About the artist
Champion (Guanjun) Qin is an award-winning composer, producer, and topliner, currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition at the University of Bristol, fully funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). His works have been performed, awarded, or officially selected at major international music and sound art festivals, including the Denny Awards (USA & China), YoungLione*ss Festival (Italy), Futura Festival (France), and the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC). Champion’s creative practice bridges electroacoustic composition and popular music production, exploring the intersection of sound design, cross-cultural aesthetics, and narrative expression. He has collaborated with and composed music for renowned artists such as Jackson Wang, a member of GOT7, one of Asia’s most influential K-pop groups. His production work also extends to film and television, including the acclaimed animated series GG BOND, which drew over 50 million viewers in its first week of broadcast.
Chufan Zhang, Jun Wang and Qi Liu: Lunar Current
“The ripples of moonlight surge and finally settle into stillness in the current. The trembling of electronic waves all find their peaceful end in the moonlit night.” – The pulses of electronic sound eventually merge into the gentle waves of moonlight, just as the surges of electric current fade into the breath of the night. This work takes electronic waveforms simulating electric current as its core sound material. Through modulation and filtering processing in a digital audio workstation, it employs techniques such as synthesizer wave shaping, ambient reverb stacking, and low-frequency oscillation to create auditory characteristics that blend the texture of electric current with the haziness of a moonlit night. Lunar Current is an immersive auditory experience. It attempts to capture not the moonlight itself, but the sensory critical state where the quiet night and electronic current intertwine. At this moment, the technological rhythms of electronic sound and the ethereal silence of the moonlit night together construct a gentle echo of a whispered conversation with the starry night.
About the artists
Chufan Zhang (born in July 2006) is a sophomore at the Communication University of Zhejiang, and also a young creator who delves into the fields of creative design and blockchain applications. Her representative works include Xuan and Mo Zang. Among them, Xuan won the second prize in the East China Division of the National University Students Blockchain Competition, and Mo Zang was awarded the third prize in the Future Designer Competition. During her studies at the university, she not only won the first-class scholarship of the university but also was awarded the titles of “Merit Student” and “Outstanding Social Worker”, demonstrating solid professional skills and cutting-edge innovative thinking in both academic research and competition practice.
Jun Wang
Qi Liu
Akiko Hatakeyama: Sawa
It’s neither close nor far, neither happened nor never happened. This is a short piano-and-electronics piece that captures a moment in an unfamiliar place.
About the artist
Akiko Hatakeyama is a composer, performer, and artist of electroacoustic music and intermedia. Akiko’s research focuses on realizing her ideas of relations between the body and mind into intermedia works, often in conjunction with building customized instruments/interfaces. It is a form of nonverbal communication with her inner self and with the environment, including the audience. Expression through sounds and performance brings her therapeutic effects, helping her process memories and trauma. Her work has been presented internationally at various venues and festivals in the U.S.A., Canada, Chile, England, Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand, China, South Korea, and Japan. Selected awards include the Best Performance Award at the NIME International Conference, the winner of the Audio-Visual Composition at the ICMA Showcase: Asia, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, and the MacDowell Fellowship. Akiko obtained her B.A. in music from Mills College and M.A. in Experimental Music/Composition at Wesleyan University and completed her Ph.D. in the MEME program at Brown University. Her mentors include Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Ronald Kuivila, Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, John Bischoff, James Fei, and Butch Rovan. She is currently an associate professor of Music Technology at the University of Oregon.
Boyi Bai: Take Me Back to Indonesia
This work is rooted in a field recording made in Madobag Village, Mentawai Islands, Indonesia, capturing children playing near an old well. As a sonic memory, it inspired the composer to reflect on the contrast between fleeting moments of travel serenity and the pressures of everyday life. The work explores the tension between two acoustic worlds. It opens with the calm of the island, employing gentle drones and textures to construct a dreamlike space between the external environment and internal memory, reimagining how memories emerge in times of longing. Sharp phone alarms and daily noises then shatter this tranquil soundscape, marking the collapse of the imagined realm. In the end, the work maintains an open, unresolved narrative tension, oscillating between memory and the present.
About the artist
Boyi Bai is a composer and sound artist specialising in field recording, soundscape composition and interactive VR spatial audio, whose practice-led works transform environmental sound into immersive auditory spaces while exploring the intrinsic relationships between place, memory and media. His works have been widely presented at internationally acclaimed festivals, art exhibitions, and radio programmes, including BBC Radio 6, TagTEAMS 2026, MA/IN Festival, SOUND/IMAGE Festival, MANTRA, PAYSAGES | COMPOSÉS Festival, and the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, building an extensive exhibition profile in the global fields of sound art and electroacoustic music. His distinctive artistic approach has been recognised with the Gold Award in the Electronic Acousmatic Music category at the 6th Denny Awards Electronic Music Competition, a shortlist for the Sound of the Year Awards 2024, and other internationally recognised professional honours.
Ed Osborn: Ventward
Ventward is built from recordings of several performances using tabletop guitar and electronics which were edited into a single work. It explores a series of sound states to produce a shifting and evolving cluster of sound, one that gradually expands its tonality and frequency range. As it does so it focuses on distilling the acoustic field down to its core textures of processed and re-processed sounds. The piece also explores a structural space that exists between live improvisation and studio composition.
About the artist
Ed Osborn (1964) works with many forms of electronic media including installation, video, sound, and performance. He has presented his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the singuhr-hörgalerie (Berlin), the Berkeley Art Museum, Artspace (Sydney), the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), Kiasma (Helsinki), MassMOCA (North Adams), the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast). Osborn has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, and Arts International and been awarded residencies from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Elektronmusikstudion (Stockholm), STEIM (Amsterdam), and EMPAC (Troy, NY). He is Professor of Visual Art and Music at Brown University.
Adrian Kleinlosen: Woody
Sound synthesis and spatialization generated with Csound, voices with espeak-ng, mixed in Pro Tools. Text based on a dialogue from a famous movie.
About the artist
Adrian Kleinlosen is a composer working with instrumental, vocal, and electronic music. His work focuses on structure, rhythm, and form, often based on the superposition of independent musical layers and processes rather than linear development. Questions of temporal organization and formal articulation play a central role in both his acoustic and electronic works. In his electronic music, Kleinlosen composes algorithmically, using a range of software environments and programming languages. Computational tools are integral to his compositional thinking and are used to design musical structure, temporal processes, and formal relationships across different media. Kleinlosen holds degrees in composition and musicology and received a doctorate (Dr. phil.) for research on musical structure and form in contemporary music. In addition to his compositional work, he has been active as an educator and lecturer in composition, music theory, and artistic research.
Yu Linke: Zen to Hearth
This piece uses temple bells as the core sampling material, with the theme of creating an auditory journey from spiritual seclusion to facing reality. “Zen” represents spiritual seclusion, while “Hearth” represents the mundane hustle and bustle of the world. The original intention is to escape from reality and construct an ideal world. At the beginning, the clear bell ringing, accompanied by minimalist electronic tones, unfolds, depicting a secluded ideal world of Zen, where the creator briefly withdraws from the chaos of the mundane world and escapes. As the melody progresses, the echoes of the bells gradually weaken, and concrete electronic rhythms and low-frequency textures gradually enter, symbolizing that the ideal Zen space is gradually penetrated by the reality of the world. The two sound elements interweave in the music to express the mutual integration and non-contradiction of ideals and reality. As the piece approaches its end, the bells serve as the background, blending with the rhythmic movement of the realistic clock, expressing that the chaotic time elements in reality struggle within the atmosphere of the ideal world, disorder eventually returns to calmness in the temple bells, highlighting the transformation from “Zen” (spiritual seclusion) to “Hearth” (mundane hustle and bustle) – escape is not the ultimate answer; the reconciliation of ideals and reality is the focus of this auditory narrative.
About the artist
Yu Linke, born in August 2004, is currently a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Music Sound Direction in the Composition Department of Wuhan Conservatory of Music. In 2023, she was admitted to the university with the top score in her major, focusing on academic practice in composition creation and sound engineering. During her time at school, her research and practical achievements have covered professional composition competitions and interdisciplinary technology contests. She has successively won the school-level composition award, the first-class scholarship, and two second prizes in provincial competitions, demonstrating solid academic accumulation and outstanding innovative practical ability in the intersection of composition art and sound technology.