Sounds & Field Notes

Three stretches stitched together from a show in Yilan: the opening, a bit from the middle, and the close. Those were the moments that really hooked me—sort of hypnotic and trance-like. The rest of the show had a much lighter, more playful energy.

Later in the same show, a storytelling segment about the Monkey King (Sun Wukong). This is a fun bit of banter from the start, right before they broke into song.

Waves pulling back over smooth pebbles—lots of snapping, crackling, popping. Sort of like something frying in hot oil.

A year later, I ended up recording the exact same sound on the opposite coast of Taiwan.

Same pebble beach, a few minutes later. Around the middle it turns strangely hollow and otherworldly. A little terrifying, honestly.

Two swells rolling in at Qixingtan, and the long hiss of pebbles dragging back out with the water.

I stopped to record this because it threw me right back to the February before, when I caught the same sound on the opposite coast of Taiwan. For some reason, I was surprised it sounded almost identical.

Birds in the trees, mopeds buzzing past, and villagers talking as they walk down the road.

Somewhere in the background, chimes keep going off—a church, maybe, or a truck playing a melody a few streets over?

The neighborhood garbage truck making its rounds down below, playing A Maiden’s Prayer (少女的祈禱)—heard from the third floor of my aunt’s house.

Layered around it: birds and a low hum of traffic outside, and someone inside blow-drying their hair.

Water running nonstop off the stalls, a cleaver thudding into fish on the block, and a vendor calling out to customers over the noise.

Listen near the end for a baby calling for their parents.

The Bannan Line pulling into the station—tiny bells jingling on someone’s bag nearby, quiet platform chatter, and the warning chime before the doors slide shut.

This one is just funny to me.

My manager and I were both listening to the fire drill announcement. Then she just kept talking afterward anyway, with no sense of panic. After that, we all looked around and waited for someone to move, until finally we started walking down the stairs.

Luckily we were only on the 14th floor. We’d been on the 75th floor just before.

A Taiwan Bamboo Partridge (Bambusicola sonorivox) calling along the trail at Xiaoyoukeng.

Toward the end, its calls get spaced out more and more. It sounded like it was growing tired, or giving up.

(I went back and measured it afterward. Over these twenty seconds the gap between calls goes from about a third of a second to half a second, and then it just stops.)

It sounds like boiling something thick and viscous. Like a hotpot that’s been reduced and thickened, and then thickened even more by taro that got forgotten at the bottom, overcooked, and turned into sludge.

My dad doing his after-lunch ritual of making tea for the family. He loves to 保養 his clay teapots—seasoning the outside with hot water over years.

That sound of him spooning hot water over the pot is still deeply nostalgic. As a kid, whenever I heard it, I knew tea was coming to me.

An F-22 Raptor passing overhead at Marina Green, followed by that loud crackling tear in the air after it’s already gone past.