Listening Room 2
Fixed Media | Program Overview
Inner Line
Hyewon Kim
A Portrait of Kwesi Brookins
Rodney Waschka
Biomimicry
Chun-Han Huang
Dear Beginner
Vadim D. Genin
Encircled
Adam Stanovic
might have seen
Takumi Harada
Silence
Ziyu Pang
Temporal Shards
Ray Tsai
When An Android Becomes Obsolete
Giancarlo Alfonso
About the pieces & artists
Hyewon Kim: Inner Line
The self is not something fixed, but rather a moving line that is constructed through continuous interaction and emotional attunement with others. However, in personality disorders, this system of connection is damaged. Mirror neurons function dimly, and the ability to share emotions by following another’s gaze or to attune feelings toward the same object becomes dulled. These individuals either fail to perceive the distance between ‘me’ and ‘you’ or become extremely conscious of it, unable to live together in a shared world. ‘Inner Line’ explores these internal fractures and fragments the audience’s gaze and emotions. The piece is structured around an unstable relationship between live performers, where accumulated interactions gradually alter the percussionist’s playing rather than producing immediate disruption. Spatially, performers and sound sources are distributed across the stage and loudspeaker field, preventing the audience from occupying a single, optimal listening position. It does not control or design the audience’s emotional responses, but rather leaves them to interpret and explain for themselves what emotions they experienced. And it reveals that this imperfect sensation itself is the essence of how we connect with others. Through this work, rather than sharpening the boundaries of the inner self, I aim to identify where our gaze has been fixed and to unravel that rigid thinking.
About the artist
Hyewon Kim (b. June 1989) is a composer based in Seoul, South Korea. She treats all vibrating objects as equal musical material, working primarily with percussion and electroacoustic media. She also conceives and produces sound-based exhibitions in which audiences directly experience the inherent vibrations of materials. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in composition from Chugye University for the Arts, studying with Sungjun Moon, and is an active member of the Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society (KEAMS). Her works have been presented at international and domestic festivals, including ICMC.
Rodney Waschka: A Portrait of Kwesi Brookins
A Portrait of Kwesi Brookins is one of a series of computer music acousmatic portraits of artists, composers, and friends. Dr. Brookins, a former professor of psychology and Africana Studies at North Carolina State University, now serves as a Vice Provost at his alma mater, Michigan State University. This sound portrait makes use of a recording of his rich, sonorous voice saying his name and (then) position and naming his main area of work – child welfare. The piece also uses a public domain melody from Ghana, a country Dr. Brookins has visited often as a scholar and pedagogue.
About the artist
Rodney Waschka II is probably best known for his algorithmic compositions and his unusual operas. His music has been called “astonishing” and “strikingly charismatic” by Paris Transatlantic Magazine, “a milestone in the repertoire” by Computer Music Journal, “fluent and entertaining” by Musical Opinion of London, and “oddly moving” by Journal Seamus. His mentors include Larry Austin, Robert Ashley, Paul Berg, Clarence Barlow, Konrad Boehmer, Thomas Clark, Charles Dodge, and George Lewis. Waschka is Director and Professor of Arts Studies at North Carolina State University.
Chun-Han Huang: Biomimicry
Biomimicry is an electroacoustic composition constructed entirely from synthetic sound sources. Originating as a technical exploration within the Max programming environment, the work emulates natural sonic phenomena—including weather patterns and animal vocalizations—without the use of field recordings or sampling. By reconstructing organic textures through digital synthesis, the piece navigates the boundary between the artificial and the natural, creating immersive soundscapes that range from ambient subtlety to chaotic intensity.
About the artist
Chun-Han Huang (b. 2002) is a composer and sound artist based in Taiwan. He is currently a graduate student majoring in Computer Music at the Institute of Music, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU). His creative practice focuses on electroacoustic composition and sound design, exploring the intersection of organic sound sources and digital signal processing.
Vadim D. Genin: Dear Beginner
The idea behind the piece is to create a relationship between the live performer and the fixed electronics, as if the performer were relying on the signals the electronics were sending. All together, it could resemble the process of getting to know the interface of some new, unfamiliar equipment, with the task becoming increasingly complex. The electronics are composed of sounds extracted from videos that have been accumulating in the smartphone’s memory for years. Moreover, the selected samples are moments during which nothing happens in the video, that is, the most unnecessary garbage sounds. Finding sounds that are not interesting in their usual form and using them for musical purposes is an interesting challenge for the composer.
About the artist
Vadim D. Genin. Born November 14, 1993. Composer, sound-artist, PhD degree in Physics and Mathematics. Graduate of the Saratov State Conservatory and Saratov State University. Major projects are the video game opera “The World of Wondrous Rooms” and the documentary cantata “The Restorer”. Participant of festivals such as impuls (Austria), IDEA IWYC (Bulgaria), ARCo (France), CEME (Israel), ilSuono (Italy), Meridian (Romania), Teden Sodobne Glasbe Bled (Slovenia), Encontres de Compositors (Spain), reMusik.org (Russia), ICMC (USA).
Adam Stanovic: Encircled
In early 2025, staff and students from the Sound and Music Programme, LCC, travelled to the London Wetlands Centre (part of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT)) to make recordings of the site and its surrounding areas. The project was inspired the long-running SoundLapse project at the Universidad Austral de Chile, where recordings of the wetlands around Valdivia have inspired ecological, educational, and creative research. During the course our project, we met with our counterparts in Chile and learned about their interests, methods, and research goals. We also met with staff and the London Wetlands Centre, and heard about the rapid decline in global wetland environments and their plans to create 100,000 hectares of sustainable wetlands in the UK. Arriving at the London Wetland Centre, on the morning of the 11th Feb 2025, I was immediately struck by the relative silence. For over an hour I had battled my way through the bustle of central London, travelling by bus, tube, and train. And suddenly, I was surrounded by stark winter trees. I could hear my feet crunching on the stony paths, and a distant crow cawing. For a moment, it felt like an oasis of calm. But as my ears acclimatised, I realised that London, the great metropolis, was ever-present. I could hear it rumbling in the distance, interrupted only by the roar of overhead planes bound for Heathrow. The more I tried to focus on the sounds of the centre itself, the more aware I became of the monstrous city beyond… We were, I felt, encircled… Initially, this piece set out to traverse city and Centre, transitioning from the chaos of one to the calm of the other. As the piece developed, however, I started to realise that it is not simply the London wetlands that are encircled; although their geographies are vastly different, most of the world’s wetlands are, in one way or another, equally encircled…
About the artist
Adam Stanović composes music with recorded sound. In recent years, his music has drawn from both studio and location recordings, using both digital and analogue technologies. To date, he has won prizes, residencies, and mentions in over 40 international composition competitions, had his music performed in over 700 international concerts, and published works on 16 different albums, including three solo albums (on the Sargasso and Empreintes DIGITALes record labels). Adam is Dean of Screen, University of the Arts, London. For more information, visit: www.adamstanovic.com
Takumi Harada: might have seen
This piece is composed primarily of sounds obtained through field recording. Originally, these sounds were recorded in a variety of locations and may appear to lack a clear contextual relationship. However, through processes of transformation and manipulation, their conventional sonic characteristics are dismantled. As a result, latent commonalities inherent in the sound materials emerge, generating connections among them and forming a unified continuity within the work as a whole.
About the artist
Takumi Harada. Born in 2000. From Tokyo, Japan. Currently enrolled at Kunitachi College of Music. Began producing works in 2025.
Ziyu Pang: Silence
In this age of information overload, countless voices swirl around us. Yet rather than merely adding our own, there are times when we simply wish to remain silent. Within that silence, everything is expressed. This work employs minimal sound material, dissecting the passage of time into numerous fragments of silence. It aims to strip away all superfluity, reaching the most fundamental tranquillity of sound and spirit, expressing the Eastern philosophical notion that ‘silence is golden’.
About the artist
Ziyu Pang, March 29, 2005, Third-year undergraduate student majoring in Music Sound Direction at the Wuhan Conservatory of Music
Ray Tsai: Temporal Shards
Temporal Shards is a short electroacoustic work that explores fragmented experiences of time within everyday perception. Through brief, distorted frequencies shaped by compression, reversal, and abrupt interruption, the piece unfolds fleeting moments emerging from a narrow temporal fissure. Temporal flow becomes unpredictable as acceleration, suspension, and sudden collapse coexist, leaving behind transient perceptual traces that resist linear progression and stable structure.
About the artist
Ray Tsai (Tsai Yi-Jui), born in Hsinchu and currently studying at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, is a DJ, music producer, and new media artist. His work spans sound art, electroacoustic music, and video installation, using experimental sonic structures to explore the relationship between technology and perception. Under the alias †Egothy†, he is active in the underground electronic music scene, performing noise, deconstructed electronics, and other avant-garde styles that shape sensory experiences oscillating between chaos and order.
Giancarlo Alfonso: When An Android Becomes Obsolete
This musical composition explores the concept of technological and computational obsolescence, comparing it to a reflection on human obsolescence and human labor, whether mechanical, artistic, or intellectual. In a social context increasingly oriented towards efficiency and automation, human beings find themselves in a state of constant competitive rivalry with artificial systems designed to be faster, tireless, and free from the weaknesses that characterize human labor. The composer makes use of the figure of an android that has reached the end of its life cycle, as a metaphor for this condition. Throughout the composition, the machine’s final moments of activity are evoked, during which states of confusion, anger, despair, and acceptance emerge. These states do not represent real emotions, but rather the result of calculations and assessments of its own operational status, which contributes to humanizing the android by placing it on the same level as the human beings. From a compositional perspective, the piece is mainly based on granulation techniques, accompanied to a lesser extent by subtractive and additive synthesis. The sound material consists mainly of concrete mechanical and metallic sounds, which are then granulated and processed, along with cold, more abstract, unstable, and unnatural synthetic sounds. The composition develops as a continuous friction between mechanical and rhythmic rigidity and sonic and timbral neuroticism, suggesting the progressive deterioration of the physical and mental functions of the android protagonist.
About the artist
Giancarlo Alfonso, (born on 14 June 2000) is a composer and electroacoustic music student at the Conservatorio