POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE: AN-TING’S SONIC EXPLORATION OF NATURE AND URBANITY
An-Ting 安婷 is a boundary-defying artist whose work draws listeners into a journey across some of the world’s most evocative landscapes. From the stark Mongolian steppe to Hong Kong’s bustling urban oasis, her compositions capture the pulse of each place, merging field recordings, electronic soundscapes, and classical piano into a uniquely immersive experience. With a background in both science and the arts—a Chemistry degree from National Taiwan University and advanced music studies culminating in a PhD from the Royal Academy of Music—An-Ting’s approach is informed by a deep curiosity and a sense of wonder at the natural world.
Her latest album, Lost Communications, explores the tension between nature and urbanity through music that echoes the sounds of grasslands, city streets, and dawn choruses. This project, alongside other work, is a continuation of her fascination with place, from the remote forests of Savernake in the UK, where she captures birdsong at dawn, to the layered cityscapes of Hong Kong, where nature finds resilience amidst skyscrapers.
An-Ting has performed her work in prestigious venues like London’s Barbican and Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, but her greatest stage is the landscape itself. Her multimedia projects—including HOME X, a celebrated Barbican performance blending augmented reality with live sound, and Augmented Chinatown 2.0, an AR app linking city and story—transport audiences into virtual worlds that echo her real-life journeys. Through the National Portfolio Organisation Kakilang, she continues to build creative bridges, connecting Southeast and East Asian perspectives with the landscapes and soundscapes that inspire her work. Each composition becomes a postcard from her travels, capturing the unseen, often unheard stories of the places she explores.
A POSTCARD FROM AN-TING
POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE: AN-TING’S SONIC EXPLORATION OF NATURE AND URBANITY
I often find myself traversing worlds that contrast yet echo one another—from the sweeping Mongolian steppe to Hong Kong’s buzzing heart. Each of these places haunts my music, leaving traces that deepen each track’s soundscape. Mongolia captured me with its vastness and the lives it holds. Around 40% of its population remains nomadic; this rhythm of life persists despite modernisation. I was intrigued by how people live with nature, not just near it. This nomadic route from Mongolia down through China, Hong Kong, and my birthplace, Taiwan, felt like a natural path, each place revealing new landscapes and perspectives. Even Hong Kong—an urban density that should jar—felt familiar, especially with my brother’s family rooted there. This journey altered how I see the world. Mongolia and China opened up raw, untouched nature, a startling contrast to the managed forests of the UK. In Hong Kong, nature is unexpectedly abundant. About 60% of the city is reserved for nature, creating pockets where the wild thrives. It’s a powerful reminder of how different worlds coexist. Now, in the UK, I find solace in Savernake Forest, where I recorded dawn birdsong, a thread that binds my music to a universal, non-human pulse.
In my album, Lost Communications, I wanted to explore nature’s “light and darkness.” The extremes of wilderness taught me a language beyond words. In Mongolia’s grasslands, there was beauty, but also a raw intensity—wolves howling, cold that stung, and a nighttime darkness that felt primordial. These conditions made me feel fragile yet profoundly alive. Morning light brought warmth, lifting the night’s heaviness into something joyful. I saw this interplay between light and dark, and it became a core mood in my work—a reminder of nature’s dual force.
My fascination with birdsong led me to weave it with droning electronics, layering the organic with the synthetic. While recording, I felt a natural pull to manipulate the sounds; after all, a recorded sound is already an interpretation, a translation. Each texture and frequency weaves into the music like another language, not quite fully human, yet deeply communicative. The depth of nature surpasses our most sophisticated technology, an interconnected cycle where life feels more advanced, operating in dimensions we only touch. Through electronics, I try to explore these textures, to find harmony between the organic and the digital.
In Hong Kong, where my track Black-Collared Starling was born, I layered city sounds with birdsong. This city is dense, yet somehow retains 60% of its land as protected nature. It was jarring to arrive there from Mongolia and the vast landscapes of western China. Yet, even in Hong Kong’s chaos, the city reverberates with birdsong. You can take a bus and reach a beach in minutes, moving seamlessly from the urban to the natural world. Hearing birds adapt and thrive in this urban space was grounding, a reminder of resilience and survival. I was struck by how creatures persist in human-dominated environments, and my music seeks to capture this—how we redefine beauty and adaptation.
The visuals for my work go deeper with AI. Working with my partner Ian Gallagher, we use AI to animate transitions within scenes, like watching a mushroom’s lifecycle from soil to bloom. AI isn’t just a tool; it reveals an intelligence that’s still unfamiliar, yet uniquely suited to explore the abstract beauty of natural growth. It mirrors nature’s complexity and unpredictability, building imagined worlds that invite us to question how much we truly understand about the world we live in.
My inspirations span from Messiaen to Aphex Twin. Their influence shows up in how I approach birdsong, layering deer sounds with the dawn chorus of birds recorded in Savernake Forest. One morning, I captured a dawn chorus where deer growls and chiffchaff songs fused in an eerie, mystical harmony. The deer sounds, once echoed and manipulated, became a melody that flowed with the birds’ morning calls. Techniques like binaural recording and frequency manipulation allow me to go deeper, but they’re also reminders of the distance that exists between us and the natural world. Every layer, every manipulation is an attempt to get closer to the language of birds, yet it also acknowledges the gap that remains. This journey will likely take me a lifetime, each step bringing me closer to understanding.
When I’m in these places, whether a Mongolian mountain range or a bustling Hong Kong street, I try to let the environment sink in, often spending weeks before I record a single sound. I don’t adhere to strict rituals, but rather let each place guide me. It’s in this quiet immersion that special encounters arise, moments that often surprise and deepen my experience of each place.
Lost Communications isn’t just an album; it’s an invitation to rethink how we listen to nature and, perhaps, to each other. Music, to me, is an energy, a conduit that moves from place to place, linking people, birds, and landscapes in an invisible thread. Through these songs, I hope to evoke something deeper, a reminder that nature’s voices—and the voices within us all—are worth pausing to hear.
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