SCALLOP
slowly growing construction

24/7

Sound Collage
2023-2024

“24/7” is a psychic sound collage project that began during the 2022 White Paper Protests in China. This unprecedented movement saw large-scale gatherings and demonstrations, which then quickly dissipated under government pressure and the subsequent lifting of lockdown measures. In the aftermath, a widespread sense of disillusionment and depression took hold, affecting me personally and many around me. These experiences and emotions became a catalyst for my subsequent work.

Against this backdrop, I initiated a series of paper-tearing practices and sound recordings as a form of psychoacoustic diary. The project evolved through three distinct phases, each transforming the original material into other forms. The images and texts accompanying these descriptions document moments and ideas from this shifting process.

“Straight lines are the only means to lead us toward a new plasticity.”
— Futurist Sculpture Manifesto (7), UMBERTO BOCCIONI, 1912

Phase 1: Tearing as Psychoacoustic Diary

During the lockdowns in 2023, I began tearing sheets of paper at home, recording these sounds with my phone. I tried to maintain an even, steady pace, almost meditative, and to keep my mind relatively blank. These slow, deliberate tears became a way of digesting the tumultuous political events and emotions lingering from the protests.

Sound Observations & Spatiality

Initially, I placed the phone at varying distances, which yielded dramatically different sonic textures. When the phone was close, the paper’s fibers ripping apart sounded magnified, revealing the granular, dynamic qualities of the tear. Farther away, the tearing line registered as a fainter contour, almost parallel to ambient noises. This prompted questions about thresholds of audibility: Where is the boundary between ‘sound’ and ‘no sound’? Different devices, rooms, and environmental conditions create countless possible boundaries.

Time, Speed & Reduced Listening

In everyday contexts, paper tearing is quick and purposeful, usually tied to the paper’s content or function. Slowing it down to a near-halt transforms the act into a purely sonic material, reminiscent of musique concrète’s notion of reduced listening; focusing on the raw auditory texture rather than the meaning or source. Yet true “reduced listening” is always fleeting, surrounded by environmental sounds like sudden thuds, barking dogs, or rainstorms that intrude unpredictably.

The tearing sounds became a personal, tactile reflection on how I record, perceive, and interpret experiences, under the pressures of confinement and political tension.

Phase 2: The “Pump” Prototype

fiber-paper-wood mechanical neural-motor-noise-assemblage composite

Despite geographical distance, the emotional residue of the White Paper Protests persisted while I was in Berlin. I felt compelled to further process the stacked sounds, notes, and sketches from Phase 1. This led me to experiment with assembling the recorded sounds into a form: conceptual “pumps”, that could circulate and transform the psychic weight of those experiences.

Tribute & Transformation

Inspired by Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, I reinterpret a small, modified fan into a sound-generating concept device—an extension of my previous “tearing” practices. In effect, this sound “pump” was both an auditory object (in the way Schwitters treated collage) and a kinetic object. I envisioned it as an evolving sound assemblage that cycles the tension of protest, depression, and the residue of public action through mechanical or sonic means.

Prolonged Immersion

Working with these sounds felt like wading through water, an extended sense of near-drowning, as a friend described. The process involved layering torn-paper recordings with different audio sample, text fragments, and objects such as Beewax. Images from this phase depict glimpses of that half-dream state, reflecting the slippage between political memory and personal introspection.

Audio Works:

Phase 3: Bricolage, Assemblage & Collective Memory

In this phase, I played the “pump” sounds back through my old MacBook with a damaged microphone, then collaged those recordings using sampler and DAW software.

I merged them with the earlier Duo sessions recorded in Beijing (2023), where I played alongside friend He Xiaoyu. This live recording set featured two primary sound sources:

Cast-Iron Chime Bell & Fence Spearhead

“Fence Spearhead”, re-appropriated as Instrument. Inspired by friend Li Xiangwei’s action of prying off a metal ornament from a locked-down residential fence, each of us held a pair of these “spearheads.”

Through He Xiaoyu’s prompt, we scratched and abraded the iron chime bell, letting the friction and metallic resonance guide us into a trance-like improvisation. By the end, the table was scattered with iron filings forming a circular pattern.

The duo session record was not perfect. I also adopted the concept of ‘bricolage’ from Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind. Opposite to rational thought, a peculiar to bricolage, is the nature of its tools and the way they work. The rules of his game are to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’. And magical thinking of scientific thought as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge.

So I continued to restore and remediate the tracks and sort out which frequency bands were contaminated and which were usable.

Audio Works:

Subconscious

Re-listening to these recordings felt like uncovering a latent ritual: one that bridged personal trauma and collective unrest. As I layered them with the paper-tearing “pump” output, I also physically manipulated the recorder across the laptop’s damaged speaker surface, introducing shifting spatial perspectives. The resulting collages blur boundaries between memory, noise, and rhythmic pulse, forming a fluid tapestry of protest echoes and personal reflection.

Audio Works:

xiuyuan shen · 24 - 7



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“24/7” remains a psychoacoustic exploration of how large-scale political events, can permeate individual consciousness. Through slow tearing, mechanical fans, cast-iron reverberations, and layered digital collage, I seek to render audible the emotional undercurrents of protest, confinement, and the fragile boundaries of personal agency.

Rather than a single finished piece, “24/7” is a series of iterative acts, constant processes of transformation, externalization, and reflection. In capturing the microsonic details of paper fibers and the macro-political tension in the air, I attempt to evoke a inner resonance between psychological states and collective historical waves.