Event date: 17:30–19:00 (EDT) Thursday, 18 April, 2024 | 05:30–07:00 (Beijing/Taipei) Friday, 19 April, 2024
Organizer: Harvard University CAMLab
Internationally renowned composer Lei Liang meditates on the concept of “home,” a theme inseparable from his musical lineage and his personal history of displacement, discovery, and return. Drawing on the haunting melodies of Inner Mongolia that have accompanied him since childhood, the Chinese written character for resonance as “the sound of home,” and his transformative encounters with Chinese cultural heritage in American libraries, Liang traces the arc of a lifelong sonic search. At the centre of the lecture is his collaborative work at the Lei Lab at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, where engineers, art historians, oceanographers, and geologists have joined forces to reimagine cultural heritage and natural soundscapes through a fusion of acoustic and visual media. Inspired by the luminous landscapes of painter Huang Binhong and propelled by original software that translates visual and material stimuli into aural experiences, and extended into the undersea worlds of bowhead whales and bearded seals in the Arctic Ocean, Liang’s work asks what it means to hear what was previously invisible, and to find in that act of expanded listening a new understanding of where, and what, home might be.
Lecture Report: “Towards a New Shanshui: A Sonic Search for Home”
Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series
Harvard University CAMLab, April 18, 2024, at 17:30–19:00 EDT
Lecture by Professor Lei Liang (University of California, San Diego)
Response by Professor Kay Shelemay (Harvard University) and Professor Hui Weng (Berklee College of Music)
Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation
Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by Harvard University’s CAMLab as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Lei Liang of the University of California, San Diego, delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Towards a New Shanshui: A Sonic Search for Home.” The discussants were Professor Kay Shelemay of Harvard University and Professor Hui Weng of Berklee College of Music. The event was introduced by Professor Eugene Wang, who situated the lecture within a broader scholarly conversation about the relationship between music and inner experience, acoustic world-making, and the ancient Chinese cosmological concept of sympathetic resonance, ganying, as a bond linking all sentient beings across time and space. Opening remarks on behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation were offered by Dr. Rey-Sheng Her of Tzu Chi University.
Prof. Lei Liang is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. He holds a Bachelor of Music and Master of Music from the New England Conservatory and a PhD from Harvard University. His orchestral work A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streets won the prestigious Wladimir Lakond Award for Music Composition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021, and his saxophone concerto Xiaozhan was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. He has also received the Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, the Creative Capital Award, and the Bogliasco Foundation fellowship. Since 2012 he has served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, where he leads an interdisciplinary team of software developers, robotic engineers, material scientists, and oceanographers. He is the founder of Lei Lab, whose projects span Chinese landscape painting, Arctic oceanography, and the development of free, open-source software for acoustic exploration.
Prof. Kay Shelemay is Professor of Music and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is among the foremost ethnomusicologists of her generation, and her research ranges across Ethiopian Christian liturgical music, the Jewish diaspora, Syrian Christian music, and the social transmission of musical tradition in urban America. Her books include A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey, Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, and Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World.
Prof. Hui Weng is Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music and a faculty member at the New England Conservatory. A celebrated performer, educator, and innovator in Chinese traditional music, she was among the first students to be accepted into NEC’s contemporary music arts department as a traditional Chinese instrument specialist. She performs on the guzheng and has received the Golden Bell Award and recognition as a rising star at the International Chinese Music Competition. Her project Rivers of Resonance, supported by the Berklee Faculty Development Grant, explores elemental soundscapes across five rivers of the world.
Where is Home? A Question in Music and Language
Professor Liang opened by inviting the young cellist Chen-yi Hu to perform a movement from his composition Mongolian Suite (2022), entitled “Where is Home?” This piece, he explained, brought him face to face with a musical and spiritual heritage that has occupied a special place in his heart since childhood: the music of Inner Mongolia.
One of his family’s closest friends in Beijing was the renowned Mongolian scholar Wulalji, who would visit regularly and, with a sip of alcohol, begin to sing, sometimes continuing late into the night. Many of these songs had been passed down to him from the legendary musician Serashi (1887–1968); others came from his mother, Jijig (1912–2005), who had preserved urtyn duu, long songs, that no one else could still sing. These memories were formed in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, when obnoxiously cheerful propaganda music saturated the airwaves. It was precisely then that the loneliness and melancholy of those long Mongolian songs pierced through to something essential, evoking in him a deep sense of longing and awakening.
The Mongols, Professor Liang observed, were the world’s most feared conquerors, yet the music they sing today is not martial in character. They sing of a mother’s devotion, friendship, loss of loved ones, and the homeland left behind, because the warriors were always far from home. These songs remind us, he said, of what it means to be away. And he asked the audience: are we not all living far from home today?
From this personal and musical beginning, Professor Liang turned to the Chinese written character. The classical scripts of Chinese, he observed, combine images, phonetics, and meanings in an interplay that generates dense poetic associations for the attentive reader. He drew the audience’s attention to two different historical writings of the character xiang, meaning resonance or echo. In the calligraphy of Tang dynasty master Yu Shinan, xiang is composed of yin (sound) as its radical and xiang (home) as its phonetic indicator. Read as a textual construction, the word for resonance means literally “the sound of home.” In a different version of the same character, preserved on the Shichen Stele of the Eastern Han dynasty, xiang is composed of yin (sound) on the left and jing (landscape) on the right. This second version gives us the meaning “soundscape.” Two poetic definitions of the same word, Professor Liang proposed, are precisely what twenty-first century sonic practice is exploring: the sound of home and the soundscape of the world are, in classical Chinese, the same word.
Discovering China in American Libraries
Professor Liang then traced the circumstances that had led him, paradoxically, to discover China in America. Born and raised in a musical family in Beijing, he left for the United States at seventeen as a high school student in Austin, Texas. His training at the preparatory school of the Central Conservatory of Music had never exposed him to an open-shelf library. His first encounter with one, in the Asian Library of the University of Texas, was an experience he described as profoundly liberating: books in English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese were all available, telling different versions of his own story, much of which had been unknown to him growing up. This encounter with what he came to call “the transparency of knowledge” marked the beginning of his search for home.
That search deepened when he came to Boston for his undergraduate education at the New England Conservatory. He frequented the Harvard-Yenching Library, browsing through string-bound volumes printed on rice paper. The physical texture of those pages, the warmth and softness of Chinese paper against his fingertips, conveyed something intimate and irreplaceable, a sensation, he noted, that no PDF could provide. It was in those shelves that he fell in love with the writings and work of the landscape painter and calligrapher Huang Binhong (1865–1955), whose theories of ink, brush technique, and light became, as he put it, his orchestration teacher.
Huang Binhong’s late paintings, created after he had nearly lost his sight to cataracts at the age of 87, are distinguished by a quality that critics have called luminous: light seeping through layers of dense, overlapping ink, invisible on first glance, revealing itself to sustained, patient attention. For Professor Liang, this quality became the model for a new kind of listening, a luminous listening in which what is initially inaudible gradually becomes present.
The Huang Binhong Project: Seeing Beyond the Visible
In 2012, Professor Liang was appointed Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. His first major interdisciplinary project took as its point of departure a 1953 album of landscape paintings by Huang Binhong, loaned to the team through the generosity of collector Elna Tsao and the Mozhai Foundation. Working with cultural heritage engineer Dr. Samantha Stout, robotic engineer Dr. James Strawson, and imaging specialist Professor Falko Kuester, the team conducted a diagnostic survey of the album in four wavebands of the electromagnetic spectrum: visible light, ultraviolet, infrared, and beyond.
The imaging process was technically ambitious. High-resolution visible images were captured at six gigapixels with a feature size of six micrometres, approximately one-tenth of the width of a human hair. A custom-designed robotic imager allowed the team to complete the analysis with a precision and speed that would have been unattainable by conventional methods. The result was access to layers of the painting that had been entirely invisible to the human eye: infrared light penetrated the surface to reveal underdrawings; ultraviolet fluorescence exposed organic compounds, glazes, and previous restorations; X-ray fluorescence confirmed the presence of cinnabar in the artist’s seal by detecting mercury at the molecular level.
The original album, each leaf measuring 46 by 32 centimetres, was divided into 1,820 micro-images, each a landscape in itself, and stitched together to be projected onto a display wall of 967 by 272 centimetres, composed of 32 monitors. With the aid of a joystick controller, viewers could fly into the landscape as if riding a drone, discovering previously unseen details of the rice paper’s fibre, its uneven texture, its unexpected cracks, and the traces of glue left as light ink spread across the page. A miniature painting had assumed the monumentality of an actual mountain landscape.
Professor Liang argued that this technology does not merely improve how we see art. It fundamentally destabilises the hierarchy of looking. We can choose to look with the eyes of a conservator, examining vulnerabilities and signs of aging; with the eyes of an art historian, reconstructing the artist’s process and technique; with the eyes of a cultural heritage engineer, asking about the genesis, anatomy, and pathologies of the object. And we can add the eyes of a composer. Each perspective reveals something invisible to the others, and the act of multiplying perspectives reminds us that our own unassisted eye is a particularly limited instrument. As Professor Liang observed, this means that those who work with invisible things, musicians, may have no less access to the heart of a matter than those who work with visible ones.
Sonic Brushstrokes: Translating Huang’s Techniques into Sound
The question Professor Liang set himself was not simply how to create a sonic impression of what we see in a painting, as composers had done for centuries, but something more radical: could one paint like Huang Binhong himself, using a sonic brush?
To do this, the team developed a suite of original software tools, all designed to translate specific painterly techniques into acoustic processes. Huang’s seven kinds of ink, five kinds of brush techniques, nine kinds of water techniques, and multiple dotting and texturing strokes were studied as compositional procedures and translated into their acoustic equivalents. Filter Bank software, designed by Dr. Greg Surges, imposed harmonic grids onto complex source sounds. Time Stretch software applied a phase vocoder to sounds, allowing them to be expanded or contracted in time without changing their pitch, analogous to the way a painter might dilute ink to modulate its density. Concatenative Synthesis analysed audio signals for recurring structural patterns and recombined their blocks in ways that preserved the musical syntax while generating something new, directly parallel to Huang’s method of deconstructing natural forms into assemblages of brushstrokes. Multi PVOC and Multi Delay tools created spatial textures in which a single sound could be stretched and distributed across multiple loudspeakers in different temporal configurations, producing an acoustic equivalent of the layered, multi-directional depth of Huang’s ink.
These tools gave rise to what Professor Liang called “sonic particles,” the acoustic equivalent of Huang’s dotting technique, dian, which deconstructs contour and outline into a field of individual marks. Just as Huang’s landscape paintings are composed not of lines but of countless individual touches of the brush, each carrying its own weight and life, Professor Liang’s compositional approach fragments sound into particles that accumulate into something larger, a texture that feels simultaneously intimate and vast.
The Arctic Ocean: From Landscape to Seascape
Having established the principle of luminous listening through the Huang Binhong project, Professor Liang then introduced a second major strand of his work, one that carries the sonic search for home into an entirely different register: the acoustic world of the Arctic Ocean.
Collaborating with oceanographers and geologists, the Lei Lab embarked on a project of sonifying the undersea environment, making audible the sounds and patterns of a world that human ears could not access without technological mediation. The sounds of bowhead whales, bearded seals, and the geological formations of the Arctic seabed became the raw material of composition.
Professor Liang made a point that carries particular weight in the present moment: bowhead whales are among the longest-lived of all mammals, surviving for over 200 years. They communicate across vast distances through song, and the acoustic environment of the Arctic Ocean is a system of extraordinary complexity and fragility. The great oceanographer and acoustician Roger Payne, who made the songs of humpback whales publicly known in the 1970s and thereby changed global consciousness about cetaceans, was a source of direct inspiration. The sounds that human technology can now access and render audible were described by Professor Liang not merely as raw material but as teachers, entities whose communicative repertoire operates at timescales and frequencies entirely outside ordinary human experience.
This work led to what Professor Liang offered as a gentle provocation: a proposal to replace the canonical “three Bs” of Western classical music history, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, with three new Bs: the Lugar Wells, the Bearded Seal, and the Bowhead Whale. The humour of the proposal should not obscure its seriousness. What it asks is whether we can expand our understanding of music as a practice of attentive listening to include forms of communication and expression that entirely predate and surpass the Western classical tradition, that exist in environments inaccessible to unaided human perception, and whose extinction would constitute an irreplaceable loss not only ecologically but acoustically.
Throughout these projects, Professor Liang was insistent on one ethical commitment that runs through all of his work: all software developed by the Lei Lab is made freely available. The expansion of listening that these technologies enable should not be the privilege of those who can afford it. This is, he suggested, a matter of principle as well as practice.
Response by Professor Kay Shelemay
Professor Shelemay opened by situating the lecture within the context of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, where the event was held, and whose galleries had provided Lei Liang with a space for meditation during his years as a graduate student and junior fellow. She described the lecture as one that had taken the audience from light, as conveyed by pigment and electromagnetic spectrum, to deeper concepts of orchestration, spatial sound, and the possibilities of luminous listening.
She offered the concept of synesthesia as a framework for understanding the lecture’s central achievement. Synesthesia, she argued, is no longer simply a neurological curiosity or an interrelationship of the five senses. In the hands of a composer like Lei Liang, working with the technologies of the Qualcomm Institute, it becomes the awakening of endless domains in which perceptions of the natural world are transformed and extended by new instruments of apprehension. She was struck by the way in which multispectral imaging allowed the team not only to see different colours but to see the same colour through entirely new eyes and ears, and she identified this as a model for a form of listening that the lecture had made available to its audience.
Professor Shelemay paid particular attention to the ethical dimension of the lecture’s commitment to free software, which she described as an insistence on ensuring that the new modality of listening Lei Liang had introduced could be available to all, not merely to those with institutional resources. She connected this to a broader vision in which home is not a geographical location but a sensory and relational one, shared not only across cultures but across the myriad landscapes and seascapes of the natural world. If home is where one first encounters sensory experiences, she suggested, then music can over time convey a more global home, one that extends above, below, and beyond geographical boundaries.
Response by Professor Hui Weng
Professor Weng began by acknowledging her personal debt to Lei Liang: it was he who had introduced her to the Contemporary Improvisation department at the New England Conservatory, where she became one of the first students to be accepted as a traditional Chinese instrument specialist, and where she later taught, gradually opening doors for other students from similar backgrounds. In that sense, she said, Lei Liang had helped her find her own musical home.
Her response addressed two aspects of the lecture. The first concerned what “home” means for a practitioner of Chinese traditional music based in the United States. As a guzheng performer and educator teaching at both Berklee and NEC, she described the question of home as one she navigates daily: her identity as a guzheng performer remains foundational whatever she does, whether collaborating across genres or engaging in improvisation, yet establishing that identity in a new cultural environment presents constant challenges of survival, recognition, and growth. She proposed that one of her most important teaching goals, newly articulated in light of the lecture, was to help her students not only to succeed but to find and build their own home, a stable place of artistic identity from which genuine voice can emerge.
Her second point took the form of a question for Lei Liang from an educational perspective: given the fusion of art, science, and technology that his work exemplifies, what skills should musicians be prioritising in order to thrive in today’s landscape? Professor Liang’s response was characteristically spare. Rather than offering a curriculum, he suggested that the most important discipline he had given himself as a student was to read at least one book outside of music for every period spent immersed in it. No curriculum could fit every individual, he said; the success of an educational institution lay in creating an environment in which everyone could become fully themselves.
Discussion
The discussion that followed ranged across several themes.
A question about the challenges of integrating Arctic natural sounds into a coherent musical work drew from Professor Liang a reflection on the fundamental disjunction between the acoustic world of marine mammals and the conceptual frameworks of Western music theory. The sounds of bowhead whales and bearded seals do not admit of description in terms of counterpoint, harmony, or rhythm in any conventional sense. Pitch, timbre, duration, and spatial trajectory all operate at scales and in combinations for which existing musical vocabulary has no adequate terms. The collaboration with oceanographers had therefore required the invention of a shared language, a process that took, in one case, an entire year of regular conversation before the team arrived at a vocabulary capable of sustaining genuine co-imagination. The emergence of that language, Professor Liang suggested, was among the most valuable outcomes of the collaboration, and he described it as an essentially creative process, one in which entirely new concepts were required to describe what was being experienced and composed.
A question about the future of musical composition in relation to technology prompted a reflection on the relationship between acoustic instruments and electronic tools. Professor Liang was clear that his engagement with technology was never an end in itself but always a means of discovering something that the technology then enabled him to bring back to the acoustic instrument. His experience with the Huang Binhong landscape project had produced a piano solo piece that made no use of extended piano techniques, exploring instead the extraordinary possibilities already latent in the standard instrument. The engagement with Arctic oceanography is generating a large-scale orchestral work that translates what was learned in the ocean back into the ensemble. Technology, in this account, functions as a kind of expanded ear, a way of learning to hear what was previously inaudible, and then transmitting that hearing to the orchestra.
A visitor from the China Academy of Arts raised the question of the Six Laws of Painting articulated by the fifth-century critic Xie He, and in particular the first law, qi yun sheng dong, typically translated as “spirit resonance and life movement.” She noted the presence in that formulation of something that could only be described in musical terms, and asked how Professor Liang understood the relationship between the theory of Chinese landscape painting and musical theory. He responded that this convergence had struck him as one of the most revealing dimensions of Huang Binhong’s work. The presence of rhythm and pulsation in a painted landscape, he observed, was not merely metaphorical. To look at a great Chinese landscape scroll correctly was an experience that necessarily involved time: the eye moved through the composition at its own pace, meditating, returning, discovering new relationships, just as a listener moves through a piece of music. He recounted being told by a collector who had loaned the team the scroll painting by Wang Wei that the one thing he asked was that they not read Wang Wei too fast. That instruction, Professor Liang said, told him more about how to hear rhythm in painting than any theoretical account could have.
The lecture closed with Professor Wang observing that the audience was leaving not only with new ideas but with new eyes and ears, more attuned to the visible and the audible than they had been before it began. That, he suggested, was the best measure of what a lecture in this series could accomplish.
Bibliography
Huang Binhong. Hua yu lu [Sayings on Painting]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1982.
Liang, Lei. “Luminous Listening: Composing with the Visual.” In Sound Practice: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musical Performance, edited by Roger Savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Payne, Roger. Among Whales. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.
Xie He. Gu hua pin lu [Record of the Classification of Old Painters]. Ca. 550 CE. Trans. Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih in Early Chinese Texts on Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.