Sick - Summer Version

New York, Darling

远方/I Don't Belong Here

Crying Cicadas mockup

Sunshine on April Fools’ Day is not meant to be real. The singing voice praises a happy scene, while the spoken voice reveals the tumult underneath the surface. Same pattern also occurs in the electronics. These opposite energies interact, collide, explode and fall back into the illusion.


愚人节天晴 April Fools' Day, Sunny

In ancient Chinese poetry, the four seasons carry deep symbolic and emotional meanings. This piece took four Chinese poems that each describe a typical scene in one of the four seasons. While reading these poems, the speaker who is alone and away from home imagines himself/herself travelling through spring, summer, fall, and winter, with changing yet unified feelings for each season.

四季 Four Seasons

Commissioned by Rhymes With Opera
Premiered at the National Opera Center in New York City on August 22, 2015
Pamela Stein (Soprano), Sarah Greenspan (Mezzo-Soprano), Kevin Virgilio (Trombone), Maiko Hosada (Percussion), Electronic Playback (data sonification of the massive outbreak of smog in Eastern China in 2013)
Music and Libretto by Lemon Guo

Smog has been polluting the lungs of Chinese people for decades, but has only started to gain major media attention in recent years, especially since the massive outbreak that affected ¼ of China’s territory and 600 million people in the winter of 2013. In February 2015, the controversial release and almost immediate ban of the documentary film Under the Dome triggered heated arguments about the science, politics and economics of the smog all over the Chinese Internet. 
Overwhelmed physically and mentally, I composed this piece, as part of an ongoing larger work, an observation of the human beings and the smog.

Smog

Hello

Human ears cannot hear frequencies under 20Hz or above 20kHz. Orca can produce sound waves that are wider than that range. I wonder, what is in there, in those ranges that we cannot hear.

I filtered out all the frequencies between 20Hz and 20kHz, in an orca whale recording. I sped up the low end and slowed down the high end, in different rates, into an audible range for human ear. There was no other signal processing applied to the audio source.

Incredible things happened quickly. Chords, melodies emerged. There is an entire sound world in those frequencies that we cannot hear with our human ear. What we hear as silence is not silent. Then I simply layered them and hope to convey the sense of wonder that struck me when I first heard that melody.

The title is a play on Wei Yingwu's poem On Sound (咏声).

On Sound:
Ten thousand things are heard when born,
But the highest heave’s always still.
Yet everything must begin in silence,
And into silence it vanishes.

Trans by Irving Y. Lo

* The orca song was recorded as a group effort (EcoSono Institute) in 2013 in Alaska, using a hydrophone and a Zoom H4N portable recorder.

* The higher frequency in this recording is limited by the sample rate (48k). Orcas can vocalize up to 40kHz, but the highest frequency this recording was able to capture was 24kHz.

* Although my initial intention was to explore the songs of orca, in reality the original recording also captured lots of other environmental sounds, such as the boat engines and water movements. What ended up becoming the piece was a transposed version of the entire inaudible underwater sound world as captured by that hydrophone.

into silence they appear

Uuuiiiidededede

Composition for Teensy-modified synth-箫 (Xiao, Chinese vertical flute, the type that often shows up in Kungfu movies with a sword and a broody young man), collaboration with Mengtai Zhang

Transplantation

There used to be sun.
There used to be sun.
There used to be sun.
I remembered.

There used to be moon.
There used to be moon.
There used to be moon.
I remembered you said.

There used to be us.
There used to be us.
There used to be us. I remembered you said she whispered.

There used to be home.
There used to be home.
There used to be home.
I remembered you said she whispered she heard.

There used to be sunflowers
She heard they used to grow.
There used to be sunflowers
She heard they spoke.

Here used to be there. Here used to be sun, moon, us, home, and sunflowers.
She heard they spoke.

There used to be here.
There used to be no sun, no moon, no us, no home.
There used to be sunflowers
She heard they spoke of our yarn.

The Yarn

In Collaboration with Mengtai Zhang

“> 19980” imagines a soundscape of the inaudible. Music lies in silence in Taoist macroscopic ideology, according to which the richest sound cannot be heard, but felt. Incidentally, human hearing is limited to a narrow frequency range between 20Hz and 20kHz, which split the sound not only from the maker but also its nature. If the sound begins in silence, which exceeds the capacity of human ear, then what kind of rhythm does it create? It is common knowledge that one cannot hear sound in the outer space. However, the space, which consists of subsonic waves, is not a soundless field. The earth, on the other hand, is filled with sounds that are beyond human aural perceptions. Dolphins, Sonars, earthquakes, humidifiers, infinite number of things are producing ultrasonic and subsonic waves around us all the time. This work starts with field recordings, including that of orcas, roosters, and everyday noise. The subsonic and ultrasonic waves under 20Hz and over 20kHz are filtered from the original recordings, and sped up or slowed down into audible ranges to generate musical materials. The work extends the Taoist idea on music, reimagining sound unseen and unheard, that transcends human experience, transforming with time and space.

>19980

Miasma

Some thoughts on gravitational waves. 
With physics consulting by Liting Xiao.

Exhibited as an audio installation at "The World Is Sound" at Rubin Museum of Art.

Untitled （2017）

composer, vocalist, interdisciplinary sound artist

Lemon Guo

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