This electroacoustic piece reimagines speech as compositional mechanism—spoken text becomes pitch, friction, and tone rather than narrative delivery. Three live voices (2 female, 1 male) operate as sonic characters in a mechanical yet expressive ensemble, shaped through spatial resonance, modulation and multi-effects processing. The “reading hall” serves as a phantom instrument, where architectural presence performs alongside the voices. Originally conceived in a 2020–2021 sonic art exploration, the work embodies an early pursuit of structure through vocal dramaturgy and spectral distance from language narration. Vocal contributors include long-term artistic collaborators, two of whom later intersected with the Chinese production of The Phantom of the Opera—reflecting meaningful creative crossings rooted in voice, space and sound architecture.

Phantom of the Reading Hall

Super Super Dux Mix

On the morning of 17th August 2017, a ripple in space passed through our planet, detected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors. This cosmic disturbance came from a pair of neutron stars colliding at one third the speed of light in the galaxy NGC4993, 130 million light years from Earth. The two neutron stars have been orbiting each other for most of the history of the universe, getting closer and closer until they merged into a doughnut-shaped unstable neutron star before finally collapsing as a black hole.

NGC4993

Produced by Telebaby
Released May 3, 2019

Phantom of the Reading Hall

Dingling Ying

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