Author: Moyan Tan

I went to a live coding workshop a few weeks ago, but it did not immediately convince me as a production tool. Compared with live coding, Ableton feels much more intuitive and efficient for the way I work. However, what unexpectedly stayed with me was not the technical side of live coding, but its visual logic. The code itself is graphic, diagrammatic, and strangely literal. Sound is not only hear but seen through language.

This influenced how I returned to my own practice in Ableton. In previous experiments, I chopped samples into Drum Racks and built an Effect Rack designed to generate continuous, non-repetitive random notes. This time, instead of treating MIDI as a neutral control system, I started drawing directly onto the MIDI clips. The visual pattern on the grid became compositional material. The result is that sound is now triggered not only by timing, but by image. The pattern becomes a graphic translation of memetic sound, and the MIDI grid becomes a kind of score-diagram hybrid.

At the same time, while researching subliminal audio for my audio paper project, I came across the concept of binaural beats. I did not apply the term intentionally during production, but I found myself instinctively adding auto-pan to one track. Later, Ingrid pointed out how effective it was. It made me realise that spatial movement in sound plays a crucial role in producing a body-mind listening experience. The sound constantly circulates inside the head to create a sense of stable instability, which is what Ingrid felt “hypnotic “.

In terms of aesthetic influence, I was thinking a lot about DJ Gurl — particularly her use of collage and glitch as both method and attitude. However, my own approach became more abrasive and less nostalgic. Rather than referencing a specific past, I wanted to construct a carnival-like compression of online sound culture: chaotic, overstimulating, seductive and exhausting at the same time. If DJ Gurl samples pop memory, I sample network fatigue. The dissociation I am interested in does not come from remembering too much, but from scrolling too fast.

Following the previous blog…

Another contradiction I found is that grounding techniques often suggest returning to the senses as a way out of dissociation — touching something cold, noticing colours, listening to ambient sound. But in reality, sensory environments themselves can also trigger dissociation.

For me, sitting with my entire family in one particular dining room makes me physically ill. The lighting, the overlapping voices, the enclosed space and the social performance required make me dizzy and nauseous. Nothing extreme is happening. No one is shouting. No argument is taking place. And yet my nervous system responds as if it is under threat.

This experience made me realise that dissociation is not always tied to obvious danger. Sometimes it is caused by atmosphere. In this context, “body-mind listening” becomes less about hearing sound and more about sensing environments. If dissociation can be produced by ordinary environments, then grounding may not come from “neutral” sensory input, but from carefully constructed sonic and spacial conditions that allow the body to feel safe again.

When I shared the prototype of my current project with Ingrid, she described the experience as both dissociative and hypnotic. She introduced me to the term body-mind listening and asked a question that stayed with me: What does it look like if the listening space reflects the genre?

We discussed DJ Gurl, and I immediately imagined a hyper-specific scene of the driver’s seat of a truck, where outside the window is a flickering dark club – people dressed in early-2000s aesthetics, dancing in strobe light.

For my own work, however, the imagined space is much quieter. I think of the rooms where I used to do homework with closed doors and controlled silence. In my work, I try to recreate such rooms. I would like to install speakers in distance for playing subtle certain door sound and footsteps sound.

Auditory processing involves both cerebral listening and body listening modes. While the cerebral mode focuses on analysis and interpretation, the body mode registers sound through physical sensations and nervous system responses. For neurodivergent individuals, this somatic experience is often heightened and less predictable, leading to intense physical reactions to sound.

At the first tutorial I had with Ingrid, she left me with a task of exploring environments that already cause dissociation and what sounds I would want to experience instead. My first reaction was quite literal: I understood “dissociation-triggering sound” as something clearly connected to trauma — a specific sound tied to a specific event. And that would be happening in a reduced listening mode, as if a single frequency or noise could fully trigger the reaction. A typical example appears in the film Girl (dir. Shu Qi), where the protagonist reacts intensely to the sound of a motorcycle or and iron door. These sounds are not traumatic in themselves, but they become unbearable because they signal the father’s return and the violence that follows. The sound acts as a warning system for the body.

I realised that my own reactions follow a similar pattern. I am highly sensitive to sounds related to doors and footsteps — not because they are loud or unpleasant, but because they carry the feeling of my mother breaking out to my space and shouting. Even certain phrases like “You are overthinking” provoke an overreaction in my body. In these cases, we are actually situated in the semantic listening mode which we are actually understanding and interpreting the meaning of an encoded message. However, for many East Asian people, trauma rarely appears as a single dramatic event. It is slow, repetitive and invisible. It exists in habits, family dynamics, silence, hierarchy, and emotional restraint. Dissociation does not only come from “bad sounds”, but from environments that constantly demand self-monitoring an emotional suppression.

John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, or Audio Privacy as a Compositional prerogative doesn’t treat sampling as a technical trick, but as a philosophical problem: when sound can be copied, cut, and replayed endlessly, what does authorship even mean anymore?

Oswald refuses the old distinction between “instrument” and “recording”. A record player in the hands of a scratch DJ is no longer a reproducer – it becomes an instrument. A sampler is no longer a neutral archive – it is a compositional engine. In this sense, plunder phonics is not about stealing records; it is about stealing listening itself and remaking it as music.

This idea resonates strongly with contemporary Chinese internet music cultures. From 土嗨(tu-hai) to 喊麦(Han-mai), from DJ Gurl’s chopped pop and 节奏的奴隶(Slave to the Rhythm) to 头七(you-qi)’s ritualised reuse of old songs, sampling here is rarely about “paying tribute”. It is about reprogramming memory. In plunderphonic practice, sound is not sacred material but more of a social surface. A 1990s Mandarin ballad, once a cliché, becomes ironic. A patriotic melody becomes glitch. A love song becomes noise. The past is remixed into contradiction rather archived.

To me, DJ Gurl’s work is more of pushing the boundary between plunderphonic and remix which somehow polishes and stylises the original but also inferences and breaks its meaning structure. In comparison, the viral trend on Douyin, mixing two iconic, almost memetic tracks together to form a new one, such as Kanye West’s Flashing Lights with Laicai , Jiafei‘s 野花香 with montagemmiau, suits better with the definition of remix.

In a culture of algorithmic sameness, interference becomes political. When every platform demands originality while supplying only templates, plunder phonics exposes a contradiction: that “newness” is often only recombination under corporate permission. The project I did in last year with internet memetic sound ended up more of a remix instead of a parody due to limited technical skills. However, I am inspired by DJ Gurl’s practice of resampling previous work and somehow plunderphonically compose them into a new one. As a result, my work would be the forth processed version of the original tracks- the first one is the original tracks themselves, the second is the remix from Douyin, and the third is my previous project.