Shzr Ee Tan (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Megaphones hiding in trees: civic instruction via mediated soundscapes in places of natural scenic beauty in China

Places of 'scenic beauty' in China – national parks, panda enclosures, holy mountains, private gardens – have been sites where encounters with nature have been constructed through idealisations of particular ecologies. Often, in these environments, the sonic design of space predicates as much on 'organic' elements as on deliberately-engineered and broadcast 'artificial' sounds. Loudspeakers are hidden in trees and rocks. Broadcasting ambient sounds throughout the course of the day, they send signals ranging from Chinese classical music to spoken descriptions of local objects of interest, to exhortations to walk in an orderly fashion, to religions chants. Sometimes, the broadcasts are presented in overt articulations in invocation of public service announcements or tourist information posts. Based on multi-sited fieldwork in Northern, Eastern and Southern China, this paper considers such mediated soundscapes along four axes of analysis. First, I contextualise such sonic 'atmospheres' within surveillance culture in China and civic instruction through public address. Second, I examine them within a longer, well-known history of Taoist philosophy that positions man in relationship to the cosmos through a perspective of 'artifice' embedded in oppositional co-existence with 'nature'. Third, I explore these articulations as multisensorial experiences found in ecotouristic brands. Finally, I critique these sonic mediations in interaction with perceived 'natural' sounds within broader theorizations of ecomusicology developed by Guy (2009) and Rees (2016), coming to conclusions on national vs local acoustic ecologies of the 'natural' Chinese world.

Shzr Ee Tan is a Senior Lecturer and ethnomusicologist specialized in Sinophone and Southeast Asian worlds at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in impact-based issues of music and decolonisation, aspirational cosmopolitanism, and race discourses in music scenes around the world, with a view towards understanding marginality through the lenses of intersectionality. Recent projects include the 2020 webinar Orchestrating Isolation: Musical Interventions and Inequality in the COVID-19 Fallout, organized with Kiku Day,  and the project  'Cultural Imperialism and the 'New Yellow Peril' in Western Art Music',  coordinated since 2019 with Mai Kawabata. Recent publications include the book chapter 'Digital Inequality and Global Sounds,' co-edited volumes Music, Indigeneity and Digital Media (Cambridge; with Thomas Hilder and Henry Stobart) and Gender in Chinese Music (Rochester; with Rachel Harris and Rowan Pease), and a monograph, “Beyond Innocence”: Amis Aboriginal Song in Taiwan as an Ecosystem (Ashgate). In addition, Shzr Ee is also an active musician (piano, accordion, Korean percussion, tango/ Balkan accordion, erhu, and Chinese and Okinawan lutes) and an arts advocate in both Singapore and the UK.

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