In Yao’s own piece, Geophone Nanking (2005), audiences are invited to sit inside a large black box in complete darkness, listening to field recordings of Nanjing in surround sound. The work references the practice of “diting,” or “earth-listening”, employed by Chinese armies 2,000 years ago. A scout would sit inside a large pottery urn, buried deep underground, listening for the encroaching enemy.

Wenhua Shi’s Futurist LoudSpeakers：Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing Roars, Bangs, Booms. This work is a tribute to the futurist artist Luigi Russolo’s memorial and his own essay on the art of noise, which presents important arguments for the adoption of new aesthetic experiences and approaches by humans in a new sound or technologically advanced society. This work is also a satire on Cold War politics, and the sounds generated by the work are short random audio from industrial sound effects from 1960s and Chinese-English language learning courses.

With the advent of social media in China, anyone can make and share recordings, and Liming Zhang’s Harbin Sound Map allows users to freely post and share their recordings based on geographic location. Then a number of apps were created to allow the public to better participate in sound creation, such as PaPa and WeChat. They marked a shift in social perception from visual to auditory, as people began to hear their own voices for the first time and began to change the way they vocalized them. This social media helped people listen and trigger their own auditory discoveries.

Sound art is still in a young stage in contemporary China. Chinese society has a very ample amount of noise and different sound ideologies seem to have inexplicable acoustic power. In the future sound art in China may be a different mode of listening, we need to find our own platform to explore sound art and we need to extend our ears to listen to the world.