Beijing wind
In Beijing, the sound I like best is the sigh of the wind. Now there are more and more buildings, thus less wind. And the buildings become increasingly high. Therefore the wind becomes less heavy.

In Beijing, the place that I find most beautiful is where there’s wind. Because there is wind there.

Pigeons whistles in the sky
A flock of pigeons is wheeling in the air, which attracts my attention and makes me look up the sky to follow their tracks. They are lucky enough to fly in the sky, while I can only look up them. A skilled pigeon-guider would use whistles of different pitches and form a harmonious rhythm. If you are fortunate enough, you may have a chance to see this.

In the sunny autumn days, when a group of pigeons is flying high in the pure blue sky, the whistles of the flying pigeons sound most beautiful to me. Why? It’s unique in Beijing. It stands for peaceful and casual life for the normal Beijingers. The flying white pigeons match the colour of the ancient city most as well.

Mirth and laughter of children in the kindergarten
My favourite sound is the mirth and laughter of children in the kindergarten. Every day I pass the kindergarten near my home. There are sounds of children’s footsteps of climbing up the slide and sliding down, the sound of the see-saw touching the ground, irregular pat-pat-pats of bouncing balls, running footsteps everywhere. There are also sounds of children singing with the teacher playing the piano, of touching bowls and chopsticks when having meals and so on.

Beijing is still a child, it needs to grow up healthily, happily and to thrive it needs our care and protection particularly. I think this is the place where my favourite Beijing sound is found. These sounds help me feel and experience every day it grows. It is happy, healthy…

The quotations above are three of the replies to the British Council’s online competition held during September 2005, which asked ‘What is your favourite sound of Beijing, and why?’. It was the starting point of the Favourite Sounds of Beijing project aimed at discovering what Beijingers find positive in their city’s vast and rapidly changing soundscape. There was an excellent response, encouraged by the offer of iPods as prizes for the most interesting entries. Over 200 had been received by the close.

Earlier in the year, the British Council had asked myself and sound artists Clive Bell, David Toop and Brian Eno to take part in their Sound And The City project in Beijing. The brief was to explore the city’s sounds and locations during a reconnaissance in March, and then to propose new site-specific sound work for realisation during a return visit in October. My artistic and research interests have long been concerned with environmental sound, so the chance to explore the soundscape of one of the world’s greatest cities at a time of fundamental change was a wonderful opportunity. It also offered the chance to make links with previous work in London, my home city. I had never been to Beijing – or China – before, so was very interested to find out how my expectations would compare to the reality and what directions my artistic responses would take.

Beijing is constantly in the news. We learn that, as it prepares itself for the 2008 Olympic Games, the city is being transformed at a phenomenal speed; that the population figures spiral ever upwards; that traffic dominates where only a few years ago bicycles ruled the streets; that concrete tower blocks rise as fast as Beijing’s traditional housing, the hutongs, are demolished, and that the economic style is unashamedly commercial. But these words and images give little of the personal experience of being there. Recorded everyday sound can powerfully evoke local detail. Why it is so underused for this purpose by the media remains a mystery. It has become the task of artists, musicians and sound recordists to fill the gap.

So what does the city sound like? The answer is that it’s amazing. Central Beijing has an astounding soundscape. Its shear scale envelopes you immediately and its variety constantly surprises. This may not last. The older uniquely traditional sounds are fast disappearing, as newer, more globally familiar, ones take their place. Peak traffic is already at high volume. But at the moment the old and new co-exist. Amongst the loud and brash, there are still places of the utmost quiet, where a breath of air touching a dead leaf will catch your ear. Elsewhere people talk, hum and sing loudly, not minding who listens. Music, live and recorded, plays anywhere. It is a city of sound loops. Ubiquitous loud hailers blast out advertising slogans that endlessly repeat in or out of sync with music from the shop next door. Pigeons fitted with bamboo whistles create eerie chords above your head when they fly. Buses screech, shop assistants yell and clap their hands, taximeters talk and woks sizzle. Street cries are commonplace. And in the parks older people sing revolutionary songs in choirs hundreds strong, while others engage in caged-bird singing contests, ballroom dance or practice t’ai chi.

Clive, David and I explored Beijing in a state of almost continual excitement. We made many recordings, partly to use in later work, but also as personal sonic diary. I had a little more time than my friends, so visited Beijing’s outer suburbs. Two memories stand out. The first was recording a primary school class – 40 six-year-old children – reading in unison. The Chinese language, with its pitched tones and sliding notes, is inherently musical and this impressive rendition was a charming and very disciplined demonstration. Later, after speaking at Peking University, students showed me a small unofficial graveyard carefully sited according to feng shui principles. It was on the edge of the expanding city. Magpies chattered in the trees above. Across a ditch stood a single traditional bamboo-fenced farm, the sole remnant of a disappearing age, its few geese honking loudly at the approaching concrete from their muddy yard. My criteria for a fascinating soundscape include a wide sonic variety, frequent unexpected ear-catching juxtapositions and places where the details of the culture and economy at work are clearly audible. Beijing has this in spades.

Following the initial visit my proposals for sound pieces were Your Favourite Beijing Sounds and Beijing Sonic Bicycle Ride. The latter was more a personal response to Beijing’s soundscape. The former was wider in scope and aimed to uncover Beijinger’s attitudes to their sound environment.

The idea for Sonic Bicycle Ride combines Beijing’s bicycles – still very evident despite the traffic – with the sampling loudhailers used by street vendors to advertise their wares. These inexpensive devices record eight-second slogans, which playback repeatedly, and loudly, until the batteries go flat. For Sonic Bicycle Ride, eight loudhailers were attached to eight bicycles and used to play specially created sounds as they were cycled around Beijing’s streets. Routes were planned through the Xicheng district – an older hutong area crossed by a few busy roads – so that the bikes would be heard in changing combinations, sometimes as one large group, sometimes on their own. The eight layers of sound were designed to be heard separately or to harmonise when brought together. Listeners could follow on their own bikes or stay in one place. Bystanders heard the piece emerging in and out of familiar neighbourhood sounds.

One nice instance occurred as cyclists encountered the ‘knife-sharpener’ man, who attracts business by scraping a blade across a metal sheet on his chest and singing his unique cry. Beijing’s soundscape is full of chance combinations and bizarre sonic coincidences. The piece was planned to take advantage of these and to add to them quietly. The specially created sounds were generally calm and musically harmonic, meant as a contrast to the sharper, more insistent city sounds.

The weather for the performance was warm and sunny. People and bicycles gathered beside the ancient White Pagoda Temple at the start of the planned route. Others were attracted by the sounds and the occasion. Many wanted to ride the bikes themselves, so different routes were tried and new ideas for playing the piece developed through the fun of participation.

The favourite sounds project was first started in London during 1998 as my contribution to the artist-run radio station Resonance104.4fm and still continues there today. Chicago has a parallel project. ‘What is your favourite sound of Beijing or London or elsewhere, and why?’ seems a simple question, but answering takes some thought. As well as a personal sonic preference, it asks about the experience of sound on a daily basis. Everyday sounds are vitally significance to our work, private lives, travel and in our feelings and memories about places. The replies demonstrate this. They vary greatly from person to person and are often given with unexpected detail. Seemingly non-sonic issues such as history, philosophy, and metaphor are raised uncovering the links and relationships that sound makes with so many aspects of life. Taken as a whole they reveal the city of the ear. It is a perspective quite different to that of the eye.

Once people’s favourite sounds have been collected, they can be recorded and form the material for CDs, radio programmes, exhibitions, websites and other areas of work. A CD, Your Favourite Beijing Sounds, is planned for late in 2006. On a practical level the project cannot be done without the full collaboration of local people who know the city well and who speak the relevant languages. In Beijing, students from the Central Academy of Fine Art and the Conservatory were involved in the recordings. I gave recording workshops, showed participants how to use the equipment and generally oversaw the project realisation. Without them, it would have been impossible, so much information and detail comes from conversation with people whilst on location.

The project also generated much discussion in the media and amongst the artists, academics and people generally. Issues such as a city’s sound identity, rapid changes in soundscape, disappearing and new sounds, noise problems and how they might be tackled and creative approaches to the sound environment were all been raised. This had been so in London – including an involvement with the Greater London Authority Environment Department during the writing of the new London Ambient Noise Strategy – and was very much the case in Beijing. David Toop and myself gave talks at Tshingua University and held discussions concerning sound art and acoustic ecology with the team designing the 2008 Olympic Park. They were interested that sound might play a part in the successive stages of their thinking. David was also invited to propose a work based on Beijing’s soundscape for the newly built Capital Museum – a project that we worked on jointly and completed in the following months.

But for me the most fascinating result of the project has been the detail of how Beijingers think and speak about the sound of their city. It significantly differs from London. Generalisations can be very dangerous, but overall the poetry and metaphor of Beijingers stand out, whereas in London thoughts seem more individual and pragmatic. A common favourite to both cities is ‘the sound of the last train/bus home’. For Londoners the reasons given are ‘at last the wait is over. I shall soon be home’. For Beijing a life story is referred to:

The voice introducing the times of the first and last train in subways

In the year of 2002, I came to Beijing from Yunnan Province to study in the university here. And this is the first time I came to Beijing. Actually, I had known a lot about Beijing and could speak standard Mandarin fluently at that. But staying in a strange city by myself, I still feel a little sad. In order not to lose my way here, I chose to take subway because it’s simpler. Therefore, the introduction of the time arrangements for the first and last bus in subways reminded me that it was Beijing here and I had to face all difficulties myself.

Three years have passed. Now I know much more about Beijing. However, each time I hear the sound of ‘The time of the first bus for Pingguoyuan Station is…’, I recall the feelings when I first came here, a little sad, but having a strong will.

Noticeable themes amongst the Beijing responses are patriotism (only once mentioned over eight years in London) and loneliness caused by separation from families left in other Chinese cities and regions –‘the sound of a phone call to my mother’. Unavoidably Beijing favourite sounds reflect the monumental changes taking place there. The following set of ideas offers a profound and particularly organic approach to the soundscape:

The sound of the construction site at night

I know that at this time there are two cities actually. One is the birth of bustle and another is the dying out of silence. The sound seems to be the crying of newborn baby, and also sounds like the moans of one who is dying. I know that the sound will stop one day. And if that moment comes, I wonder if I would feel at ease or feel lost.

The linkages, metaphors and poetry in the Beijing replies made a strong impression on me and definitely opened up new lines of enquiry for the future. I can only finish by presenting three more of these wonderful replies.

Traffic hooters sounding in the sky

Everyday I meet traffic in the rush hour, hear the noises from hooters that are noisier than those of voices from people, conveying the magnifying anxiety again and again. So I must force myself to like this ‘popular music’, otherwise I will become frantic.

Old songs in Jingshan Park

Every weekend in Jingshan Park, there are always many middle-aged or old people gathering there and singing together. They are the audiences of their own. Old songs are like wine. Even an old accordion could bring those intoxicated people back to the past. When singing the old songs of idealism, their eyes are bright and filled with deep love. I love this kind of reminiscence, making me feel warm. And I love the feelings like going around and cleaning the old photos.

Flag-raising in Tiananmen Square

My favourite is the sound made by the soldiers of the flag-raising squad when they march with parade steps to raise the national flag every morning in the Tiananmen Square. Bang, bang, bang…, the sound is so uniform, rhythmic and forceful. On seeing this, I’m deeply moved. The feeling of solemnity wells up in my mind, not from the moment when the national anthem was played, but from the moment when the soldiers take the first step.

I was only eight years old when I watched the national flag-raising ceremony for the first time. The sound of the firm steps of those soldiers has been engraved in my mind. Even now, I find it sacred. The sound of parade steps is peculiar to China. Many people from other parts of our country come all the way to the capital just to listen to the sound of the parade steps. As a native Beijing citizen, I feel happy that I could watch at Tiananmen Square.

In the past, I just knew national anthem is a sound that can best represent a country; it is so solemn that can only be heard in significant occasions. As time goes on, I came to understand the true meaning of national anthem. When our country gains honour, especially when a foreign force threatens our people’s safety and interests, the national anthem would sound. It sounds beyond our hearing, calling our people to unite, reminding our people that they should be brave and there is nothing to be afraid of. Since you are not alone, there’s always a powerful supporter behind you. So national anthem haunts the heart of her people at any time and in any place. One day in the future, I may go to a foreign country to study abroad for further education. At that time I will hang a five-starred red flag beside my bed, so that I can hear the national anthem any moment when I’m homesick.