Scoring the Social Voice: Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music

Lin Chi-Wei’s Tape Music is an experimental project in which its performers pass a musical score, written across a long piece of tape, amongst themselves as they respond to its vocal cues. New scores are produced for each iteration of the project with specific contexts and groups of participants in mind. As researcher Jonathan Packham finds, the scoring of Tape Music is as much a process of revealing the social dynamics of its participants as it is of laying out a piece of music.

It is a cold March afternoon in Hökarängen and the last of the winter snow is still visible on the ground. In a launderette turned non-profit arts space in the centre of this Stockholm suburb, members of the local community are congregating. People are singing, speaking and shouting. A little girl is meowing. They are making noise together.

Lin Chi-Wei, a Taiwanese transdisciplinary artist and writer, is demonstrating his ambitious Tape Music project. At this Swedish gathering in 2007, the composition had only been in development for three years. By 2014, Lin had presented it over a hundred times across numerous cities, regions and nations. Each iteration of the work consists of one or more musical performances whose parameters are set out through an unusual score object: every score consists of a long ribbon (or “tape”), adorned with phonetic characters of varying languages. At present, eleven different versions exist: six are in traditional or simplified Chinese, but there are also iterations in French, Swedish and English.

The ensemble that performs the work is made up of participants drawn from the area in which the recital is taking place. Each version of the score is produced with a specific community or location in mind, and so the characters on each ribbon are written in a language common to the nation or region. Lin writes:

There have been around 100 sessions and more than 2,000 people have participated. People from primary schools, temples, churches, factories, local governments, neighbourhoods, folk music groups, empowerment groups, training groups, and also visitors and audiences of museums, music festivals, bars and venues. ¹

Participants are seated in a spiral in the centre of the performance space. An individual sits at the spiral’s outside edge – typically Lin himself – and begins to distribute the tape, unspooling the ribbon as it is passed around until it collects in the middle. Performers can interpret the characters on the tape through vocal sounds of any pitch, timbre, or volume, and may read the ribbon at any tempo. However, Lin requests that individuals do not accumulate too much slack between them and the person to their left. Ideally, the ribbon should be kept reasonably taut by way of unspoken cooperation between participants. As the ribbon is passed, performers may begin making vocal sounds of their own choosing. A great variety of chants, grunts, and whispers quickly fills the space. As each new symbol on the ribbon comes into view, performers repeat, alter and augment their sounding utterances to produce a heterogeneous and chaotic polyphony.

Tape Music is part sonic artwork, part “sociological experiment”. ² Lin suggests that each performance of the piece demonstrates how “space, time [and] the specific gathering of people” produces “a distinctive way of sound making”. ³ Every performance of Tape Music is different, and it is impossible to imagine how one might sound from reading the score alone. In the Luca Guadagnino film Call Me By Your Name (2017), there is a scene in which we observe the young protagonist Elio scrutinising a few pages of a musical score – perhaps by Bach or Ravel, whose music features on the soundtrack – in the grounds of his family’s villa. When love interest Oliver asks him what he is doing, he responds simply: “reading my music”. ⁴ One interpretation of the scene is that he is perusing the score for pleasure, perhaps imagining the sonic result from the notation alone. It is hard to picture Elio doing the same with Lin’s score, smiling sweetly as he slowly fills the sun-soaked vineyard with an endless ribbon, polyphonic chaos running through his head. In order to understand the piece in its full conceptual richness, we have to situate the score in the space it is realised. This process of situation changes the sonic outcome.

Richard Sennett puts this slightly differently. He reminds us that if you sow a seed in “different circumstances of water, wind and soil”, you will yield different results. ⁵ In urbanism, “seed-planning” refers to an approach in which architectural spaces are prepared or designed in such a way that they might change, grow, or be put to use differently depending on their environmental circumstances. A similar type of thinking can be applied to music. Lin’s scores are seed objects that may grow and flower diversely according to the conditions of the performance space – or “habitat” – in which they are situated and activated. The sonic result of any given performance of Tape Music is directly shaped by the local environment. Naturally, environments are also constituted by their human inhabitants, who are the crowdsourced executants of Lin’s work. By engaging these inhabitants, Lin’s composition aims to shed light on social and political formations present at the site of performance.

Whilst a single activation of Tape Music can make evident the social formations at play within a single musical performance, the most interesting aspect of this project concerns the relationship between realisations of the score across different environments. With this focus in mind, Lin has produced meticulous documentation of every iteration of the piece. This archive begins to map out the differences between performances across multiple cities, regions and nations. A report on each is written, detailing its time, space, curators/programmers, context, sponsorships, audience, feedback and “other personal observations”. ⁶ Lin’s reports highlight the difference between a generalised “space” of musical activity – where we might observe the complex and variable socialities governing any ensemble performance – and a more localised “place”, within which community‑specific forms of social interaction may find voice. Examining multiple performances of Tape Music in situ can help to clarify this distinction.

The performance described at the start of this essay took place at Konsthall C, an arts centre and former community launderette in Hökarängen, Stockholm. The building was designed by David Helldén and erected in 1949 as a social meeting place for residents of the area. In 2004, the arts space Konsthall C came into being as a kind of “democratic social development” (demokratisk samhällsutveckling), founded on a commitment to values of diversity, equality and solidarity. ⁷

In his report, Lin commends the cooperative and communicative spirit of the Stockholm cohort. He suggests that this performance was “special” because “the participants [kept] on listening to [each other] all the time”. ⁸ The score functioned as a device through which performers could “sound” their cooperation. This was achieved primarily through the act of listening to and “harmonising” with their fellow participants. As the report suggests, “every participant [listened] to the collective sound and [tried] to… integrate [into] it”, producing concurrent sounds that Lin perceived as forming a coherent whole. ⁹

However, as alluded to previously, this cooperativeness might be interpreted as a community-specific form of sociality. Lin describes a discussion by participants after the performance about the Swedish idea of lagom:

There was a funny talk concerning the idea of “Largom” [sic] (the Swedish idea of ‘normalised’ social value?) in the discussion after a performance, the Swedish talk about how the performance “demonstrates” this common Swedish idea in the harmonic forming, pity I don’t really understand the meaning of this word immediately so the discussion remains quite abstract for me. Well, they talked about everyday politic [sic] here. ¹⁰

Lagom is popularly translated as “not too little, not too much” and is a culturally significant notion of having “just the right amount” of something. A common – but sadly false – etymology for the term references the Vikings, who might pass around the same horn or bowl in circles so that everyone could have their fair share, laget om (around the team), an image not dissimilar to a performance of Tape Music. ¹¹

The cooperative spirit of the Konsthall C performance might be read as the “voicing” of a culturally significant mode of behaviour: in this instance, the sense of community, consensus and harmony exemplified by the term lagom. Though this remains a subjective and potentially imperceptible quality of any performance, it remains significant that Lin’s participants discussed this topic. We could thus think about the process of performance as one of sonification: the “voicing” of an “everyday politic”. ¹² The inhabitants of the local area – its citizens – literally “make their voices heard” by performing Tape Music, but in doing so they also make audible a more abstract “voice” of the suburb, city, region or nation in which the performance takes place.

We might therefore suggest that Tape Music demarcates a temporary grouping in which performance helps make the local audible. This ephemeral aural community can be understood politically: by giving people the opportunity to express a distinctly local mode of being, Lin asks his participants to both take up space, and to make noise. These two actions are connected: as Steven Connor writes, “volume is voluminous”. ¹³ Citing Michel Serres, he suggests that:

power involves the power to make a noise, while making a noise is the assertion and performance of power. ¹⁴

In many ways it makes sense that such a cooperative performance took place at Konsthall C. Lin’s report interprets the suburb of Hökarängen as “a […] socialists’ community” constructed during the 1940s, suggesting that the former launderette and neighbourhood meeting space represents “a critique against the notion of rational construction” in the form of “community planning”. ¹⁵ Though this is no doubt a rose-tinted view of the area, its spatial characteristics – in tandem with the culturally specific “everyday politic” detailed above – contribute to a musically collaborative performance with a harmonic sonic result. There is a kind of spatial consonance between the community‑focused architecture of Hökarängen and the lagom-driven performance at Konsthall C. Lin’s composition aims to give the power to be noisy to the community and the urban conditions of this performance are cooperative toward this goal.

However, this kind of spatial consonance isn’t always present. A particularly interesting performance of Tape Music took place in a factory owned and operated by the Tomiyama Group, a company that manufactures precision metal for electronic appliances and medical equipment. The factory in question is based in Shenzhen, China, an economic hotspot that was one of the world’s fastest‑growing cities in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, Shenzhen was one of the first five “Special Economic Zones (SEZs) of the 1980s” in China that came about through “Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Open Door’… experiments with market economics”. ¹⁶ These SEZs offer tax holidays, low rent and cheap labour to mostly foreign investors.

A performance of Tape Music took place in Shenzhen in November 2009. Its participants were a “folk music group, supported by the factory owner, whose members are also labourers in the enterprise”. ¹⁷ They performed in a room at the factory that also employs members of the ensemble. Instructions were circulated amongst the participants, and Lin began to distribute the tape according to the conventions described at the beginning of this essay. However, though the performers were content to pass the tape amongst themselves, they did not produce any sound. Lin remarks that “no-one emitted a word”; the participants “silently transferred the ribbon without making any noise for 15 minutes”. ¹⁸

Lin interprets their sonic inaction as an affirmation of their position as “musician‑labourers”, suggesting that “if there is no instruction given, they just won’t work”. ¹⁹ Here it is the socio‑economics of labour practices – rather than an abstracted sense of local or community behaviour – that informs Tape Music’s performance practice. This said, it could be argued that in SEZs, the “community” is structured by socio-economic means. Many workers live in “labour compounds”, ferried endlessly back and forth between their accommodation and their place of work. One worker, when “asked if he ever visited the downtown skyscrapers and shopping malls” in Shenzhen, replied: “I have to work every day”. ²⁰ In this instance, the everyday politic is not made audible, but rather revealed through silence. We might argue that there is friction between the democratic potential of Lin’s work and the industrialist/capitalist forces which govern the factory space. Tape Music’s grounding in collective and cooperative experience – coupled with the notion of taking up space – suggests circumstances in which its participants have ownership of and responsibility for both the means of production as well as that which is produced.

The performance site is an institutional space of work. Here, the division and serialisation of labour is paramount to the production of goods and ensures that the factory creates profit for its owners, managers and shareholders with maximum efficiency. However, the qualities of the space that function towards economic gain and industrial efficacy are not necessarily as serviceable in pursuit of music performance. Tectonically speaking, the factory room is as good a space as any – perhaps the acoustic is slightly dull, or maybe there’s not enough space for people to sit comfortably – but there is nothing about these four walls that suggests a musically satisfactory performance of Lin’s piece couldn’t occur. In order to understand this spatial tension, it is necessary to consider how the performance space is constructed beyond tectonics and encompasses social, political, cultural, corporeal, and economic factors. To my mind, the fact the musicians involved in the performance are labourers for the company and therefore spend time in this room regularly is key to the spatial dissonance at play in this iteration of Lin’s composition. One could link the serialisation of labour on the factory production line with a loss of individual agency and ownership, notions central to a sonically rich performance of Tape Music. Lin’s sociological experiment is derailed because his evaluation takes place in the space of work, a site in which sociality is rigidly defined and/or limited by a management regime that serves to implement and uphold anti-worker industrialist labour practices in order to increase profit. ²¹

The performance in Stockholm emboldened the voices of its citizens, amplifying a localised form of social behaviour and providing an opportunity to make noise and take up space. In Shenzhen, the performance makes painfully audible the politics of silence that reigns in SEZs. As Keller Easterling writes:

Maintaining autonomous control over a closed loop of compatible circumstances, the isomorphic zone rejects most of the circumstance and contradiction that are the hallmark of more familiar forms of urbanity. In its sweatshops and dormitories it often remains a clandestine site of labor abuse. ²²

In the SEZ, localised forms of social interaction are more explicitly mediated, controlled or regulated by the capitalist and industrialist ideologies that brought about the existence of the zone in the first place. The community centre in Hökarängen – built on values of diversity, equality and solidarity – feels very far away. It is no surprise that the voices of these two cities sound very different.

What if we could interpret the factory workers’ silence not as political inaction, but rather, as a striking statement of solidarity?

The online synopsis written for Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: the Political Voice proposed that “to be politically engaged is to have one’s voice ‘heard’ in the public space”. ²³ This essay has drawn a political distinction between the Hökarängen cohort’s noisy act of taking up space, and the voicelessness of the musician-labourers in Shenzhen – but what if we could interpret the factory workers’ silence not as political inaction, but rather, as a striking statement of solidarity? Their collective silence might be understood as an act of protest against their environmental circumstances, in stark contrast with the spatial consonance observed in Stockholm. Read as such, the silent performance of Tape Music is perhaps its most powerful activation so far.

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The print edition of this article features
illustrations by Tom Gooch
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