Sound Box: Voices in the City

Sound Box: Voices in the City is a sound art project initiated by Xingyu Li, exploring the city, listening, and the unexpected encounters that emerge in everyday life. The project consisted of a temporary listening space that existed for only seven days, together with an open-form soundscape concert. Unlike conventional exhibitions or performances, Sound Box offered no fixed mode of viewing and no clear boundary between stage and audience. The distance between people, sound, and one another became almost tangible. There was no prescribed route to follow. The only thing one needed to do was to slow down, stop for a moment, and listen.

Located in a street-facing space near Beijing’s Drum Tower, the sounds behind the window changed each day. Recordings from deserts, rivers, jungles, crowds, and silence slowly drifted through the noise of the city, forming a temporary museum dedicated solely to listening. For some passersby, it was merely a brief pause. For others who arrived intentionally, it became a window opening onto distant places.

As part of the project, Whale Circus presented Soundscape Live, an open-format concert in which musicians and audience members shared the same space. There was no stage and no fixed seating. People were free to move, talk, stay, or simply wander through the experience in their own way. Music became part of the surrounding soundscape, and together with the space, the changing light, and the presence of strangers, created an experience that could never be repeated.

Sound Box grew out of an interest in the unpredictable relationships that emerge in streets and public spaces. For Xingyu Li, what has always been fascinating is not the established order of spectatorship, but the encounters and exchanges that happen by chance. When performers are no longer simply performers, and audiences are no longer merely audiences, new connections quietly begin to appear.

Sound Box also represents one of the earliest public space and sound archive experiments of 52Hz Sound Cabinet. It sought to bring sound out of galleries and concert halls and back into the rhythms of everyday urban life, leaving behind a window where people might pause and listen.