Look me in the eye

This recording was originally broadcast in 1963, in the first year of Taiwan’s first terrestrial TV station, the Taiwan Broadcasting Company. "Look me in the eye" takes a short sequence of a mountain folk song sung by a women’s chorus, from the original 30-minute recording. 

I layered sound in GarageBand, selecting and editing archival material, contemporary field recordings, overheard dialogue and digital loops, to build aural glimpses of cultural, temporal, and geographic landscapes. By positioning the mountain folk song in dialogue with a recording of a metro train in a Tokyo tunnel, I form a sonic relationship between the mountain above, the underground below, and the distant flatland of my Newhaven studio from which the piece is composed.

The folk song functions as both voice and landscape, carrying the acoustic imprint of elevation and openness (shaped by geography rather than infrastructure), of a community embedded in place, where sound travels across valley and mountain, retaining its sense of distance and air, pointing toward cultural memory rooted in the land. 

In contrast, the Tokyo metro recording introduces a dense, enclosed soundscape. The arrival and departure of a train, with its mechanical rhythm and reverberant tunnel, defines movement, efficiency, and compression. This sound carries additional historical weight: Japan occupied Taiwan from 1895 until the end of the Second World War, leaving lasting marks on its infrastructure, education, and cultural systems. The presence of contemporary Japanese urban sound alongside Taiwanese traditional song resonates not only as a meeting of modern and pre-modern space, but as an echo of shared, asymmetrical history.

As sound worlds overlap, they form a layered sonic landscape. The intermittent warmth and discomfort of a questioning voice gets lost beneath the noise of a train, receding and submerged beneath the city. This shifting balance reflects a complex negotiation between tradition, modernisation, and historical memory, echoing the cultural tensions explored by post-war experimental art movements and ideas of Modernism.

Yet, a third landscape underlies "Look me in the eye": the lands of the Western world, from which I compose and listen. Positioned beyond both mountain and subway, I observe, engaging with unfamiliar environments through recordings, digital tools, and historical distance. This perspective acknowledges the role of translation, power, and interpretation.

"Look me in the eye" presents landscape as something heard rather than seen. By moving between mountain, underground, and flatland perspectives, the piece reflects on how sound carries history, place, and identity across time, distance, and cultural boundaries. The folk song becomes less a fixed artifact and more a mutable terrain, shaped by time, technology, and reinterpretation.

Regional music of the Republic of China (Taiwan) reimagined by Rachael Adams.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds