Psychoacoustics is a fringe discipline that studies the relationship between sound and the auditory sensations it evokes. I felt that the term psychoacoustics was very confusing to me when I first heard it, but it’s really quite simple – it’s the way that the human brain uses to interpret sound. For example, if a person shouts at the top of their lungs and gently steps on their foot at the same time, I will hear them shouting, but I may not hear them stepping on their foot. I am then mentally attracted to his shout because it is richer in high frequencies. I was thinking that when we listen to some music, if there is an instrument that is very special, it might make the listener attracted to that instrument. I was listening to a piece of Chinese-influenced music that had a part played by the suona, a traditional Chinese instrument, and when I got to that part, my attention was completely drawn to the melody of the suona. This is probably the same as shouting and stamping in which the shout is more appealing.

In my piece I can also use the concept of psychoacoustics to accomplish this. Because I want to create an atmosphere with a combination of field recordings and synthesisers. My field recordings may be more appealing to the audience than my synthesizer sounds, and I hope that this will turn the piece into a better sense of rich space.

Yan Jun is an experimental musician. He is mainly engaged in improvised music, experimental electronic music, field recording and sound art. When I listened to one of his albums called Plays John Cage, the music in the album artwork was borrowed from John Cage’s 4 ’33” played with no intentional sound.

I think the most interesting piece in this album is the piece 0’0″, in which I can hear the sound of keyboard typing in this 26-minute piece. Although I don’t know what he wrote, I can imagine that the artist may have used this method to express his own point of view or to express who he is. In fact, he was also inspired by John cage’s 0’0″ for this piece.

In 1962, Cage wrote 0′00″, which is also referred to as 4′33″ No. 2. The directions originally consisted of one sentence: ‘In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.’ At the first performance Cage had to write that sentence. The second performance added four new qualifications to the directions: ‘the performer should allow any interruptions of the action, the action should fulfill an obligation to others, the same action should not be used in more than one performance, and should not be the performance of a musical composition.’

I think Yan jun is one of the representatives of contemporary sound art in China at the moment, and his other works are very experimental and incorporate a lot of noise elements. He also said in an interview that in the future, 90 percent of Chinese sound art creators may disappear, and people will start with noise and eventually go back to pop music, or simply give up creating, which may also have to be linked to reality. People should have to extend their instincts into a self-consciousness.http://www.yishushijie.com.cn/sesquiton/article/?type=detail&id=152