Shamanic Slow-quin with the New Nature

Sofy Yuditskaya interviews Echo Ho.
Featured photo of Echo Ho from SlowQin performance by Katharina Kemme

Echo Ho is an experimental artist with a nomadic soul. As part of her artistic journey, Ho has reinvented the ancient Chinese seven-stringed guqin into a hybrid Plexiglas ”Slow Qin”. Continuing exploration is the result of a process of building an open-ended new instrument and interface that is engaged in her interdisciplinary art practice

note from the author// I meant to write this article at the very beginning of 2020–but as we famously know, that is when a global plague occurred, reminding us how incredibly interconnected we are planet-wise. This article ended up hanging out in my drafts from close to three years! But now as the noises of the traffic once again get louder and people start zipping all over the world, I was reminded of this image:

This is the artist Echo Ho playing her instrument the Slowquin under a highway overpass in Shanghai (which is still largely closed to international travel due to Covid-19). But, Bangalore, where I am currently located is not, and it is full of very noisy, very congested overpasses just like this one. The Slow-quin is Echo’s modernized version of an ancient Chinese instrument called the Guquin. The guquin is a quiet instrument with no resonator, intended to be enjoyed within the sounds of its environment. The guquin is an instrument symbolic of high culture, famously used by scholars as a ritual instrument. It is meant to relate a feeling of balance in all things as it is played.

There is something fundamentally, canonically, irresistible about this concept. We are a part of nature, and what we make becomes a part of the environment. Maybe if we listen to it carefully we can balance it out. Likewise that there are so many human made structures defining our environment, almost everything around us has been in one way or another defined by us. Therefore it seems all the more appropriate that this ancient instrument updated with networked electronics, joining in the flow of time.

For the project above Echo traveled to the megacities of Beijing and Shanghai and played the SlowQin on traffic islands in what she calls “urban nature”.

She writes: “This performance refers to the historical motif of the solitary Guqin figure alone in nature familiar in traditional Chinese painting, which depicts a Guqin player traveling with the instrument and playing in places of outstanding natural beauty. Substituting the environment of nature with the landscape of contemporary mega-cityscapes, skyscrapers become the new mountains, highways the new rivers, and the SlowQin becomes the new Guqin. Like the ancient Qin player, a SlowQin player aims to react or echo the ”nature” of the site. On the one hand, she improvises with what ”speaks” to her and her body emotionally. On the other hand, the SlowQin is listening to the site in a technical manner; the player can record multichannel sound, including the strings themselves, vibration (with a sensor), wind (via special pickup microphone) and the electromagnetic environment of the Hertzian space (via three axes of sensing coils). In this way, the SlowQin becomes a full interface for collecting environmental data including sound. The on-site performances thus become a practice of augmented field recording. Besides becoming music in the performance itself, all recordings also become material for later compositions and installations.

The performance itself becomes an alternative way of storytelling, in search of a place amidst rapid changes in all areas of life — principles of randomness, the oracle-like ephemeral tapestry in sound and vision.

According to Analytical Dictionary of Characters the guqin was invented by Shennong, god of farming.

In the article A Discussion on Qin, Liu Ji from the Southern Song Dynasty further explaines, “Qin means jin, namely, prevention. It forbids the evil and guides the mind to the righteous.” In this text the attribution is given to Fu Xi who along with his sister and wife Nüwa created humanity and music.

The Guquin represents heaven and earth, Yin and Yang. In most scholarship today it is representative of refined intellectual pleasure, Apollonian, not Dyonisian. It is attributed to creating a sense of social calm.

But the Dyonisian side is also strong in the practice of playing the Guquin. It is said that Guqin players can summon spirits, predict the future, and convert the energies of Yin and Yang to their needs, and that the origins of Guquin playing come from Wushi or shaman. This double threaded history of the Guquin being a rational, cerebral instrument of the state and one of other-worldly trances tracks because the Qin dynasty of the early 1600’s did in fact place Shamanism at the center of state functions and governmental action. From 1644 until 1912 the Quin Emperors had an official shamanic shrine at the capital in Beijing and consulted professional shaman, usually women, in the forbidden city as part of their ruling duties.

more info: Rawski, Evelyn S. (1998), The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, ISBN0-520-22837-5

Some more cultural context from Echo’s 2019 Nime paper on the instrument:

“The Guqin is a fretless zither with usually seven strings. Playing the Guqin is not merely a musical practice, but also a sophisticated form of meditation with rich connotations; there is extensive literature on its symbolic significance within classical Chinese high culture. Historically, it was tightly connected to the culture of literati scholars and its representatives as the political and intellectual elite in pre-modern China. The Guqin was also understood as a medium between human beings and nature. A person playing the Guqin next to a waterfall as an articulation of this practice of mediation was a central topos in traditional Chinese landscape painting. The surviving texts about the Guqin are mixtures of Daoist, Confucian and Buddhist philosophies. The main message of these texts is that the Guqin as a physical object should benefit and harmonize the world. Potential benefits of the qin are said to include: ”Restore divine nature and restrain low passions (歸神杜淫gui shen du yin; reference is to Shen Nongin Huainanzi) Body at rest and mind at peace (體 精而心閑 i jing er xin xian; Xi Kang). Control the universe (天下治 tianxia 2 ; i.e., bring the world in line with the way it should naturally be; Fengsu Tong)”. Music of the Guqin as nature’s melody is also expressed in poems as ”heavenly naturalness” – it captures life as nature does. Resembling and mediating nature in this way is the highest possible praise for art and music in ancient China.”

“There is speculation in China about the Guqin having originally been developed by Wushi (shamans). Thus, the SlowQin is treated as a ritualistic object that enables alternate ways of storytelling. The player borrows the Guqin’s pre-historical shamanistic practice as a technique of intermediating between the human world and the spirit world. Integrating the SlowQin as a technological interface allows to transfer her ‘memories,’ at once autobiographical and collective, to weave into an ephemeral tapestry in sound and vision. Creating apparently ”magical” intensity in solo audiovisual performances is facilitated by complex layering: The visual layers mainly use preproduced elements, and their flow is played live. Rhythmic layers come from an Ableton Live project that is controlled by sensor data from the SlowQin interface via the EchoQin app; acoustic string sound layers are played and processed live on the SlowQin; Polyphonic vocal layers (to achieve shaman-like ecstatic moments) are created by live-sampling, in effect accumulating passing events into an ongoing multi-layered present. In inspired moments, the layers seem to sparkle in the air as they form pentatonic clouds of ghostly and onomatopoetically distorted chant.”

(Ho, Echo, Alberto de Campo, and Hannes Hoelzl. “The SlowQin: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Reinventing the Guqin.” NIME. 2019.)

I finish with some interview questions from Echo:

Sofy: Tell me about what novel electronic techniques or software configurations, you have made to create your unique sound.

Echo: SlowQin emphasises the openness for continuously rethinking and reinventing the guqin’s possibilities. Acoustically the SlowQin resembles its predecessor guqin. It is fitted with a B Band piezo pickup under the bridge, a wide range of sensors connected to an Arduino Mega combine a JeeLink to provide a rich wireless connection to computer software. The sensory body of the SlowQin is comprised of seven switches, four pushbuttons, eight potentiometers, a light sensor, two pressure sensors, and a long slide potentiometer, seven synthetic silk strings. In the current implementation, most of these input control parameters are mapped on to multiple manipulations for real-time data and sound sampling and processing. Include real-time audio synthesis and manipulation, such as polyphonic pitch, revers and pentatonic shifts, apply complex sound effects on acoustic inputs, multi-modes live looping, granular type modulation and complexing layering. By reprogramming the computational side of the SlowQin can open many possibilities for different behaviours of the control elements. These facilities rely on the digital brain of the instrument, a standalone SuperCollider app (contributed by Hoelzl and Hildebrand), which develops progressively in close collaboration between artistic concept and hard and software prototyping.

Sofy: How do your performances tie into causes and ideas that are important to you personally, feminist visibility and your spiritual practice.

Echo: The guiding idea of performing with the SlowQin was first explored as a new electroacoustic instrument for improvisation contexts. Secondly, to rethink the Guqin in light of Western experimental music, and implements the use of experimental music as an interdisciplinary art practice derived from the ancient concept of guqin’s playing as a practical philosophy. Above all, the experimentation with the SlowQin emphasized playability in today’s world of complex cultural and ecological environment. It is an exploration of identity, a persona, a political/poetical statement, meant to recontextualise the performance space. My relationship with gender is autobiographical and spiritual. Thus, the SlowQin is technically treated as a ritualistic object, that is mimed shamanistic technique of intermediating between the human world and the spirit world; memories, or better yet, false memories of a fantasized past and an intangible future, create a dreamlike apparently ”magical” intensity in solo audiovisual performance. The performance itself becomes an alternative way of storytelling, in search of a place amidst rapid changes in all areas of life — principles of randomness, the oracle-like ephemeral tapestry in sound and vision.

Bio:

Echo Ho is an experimental artist with a nomadic soul. Her work creates an onomatopoeically distorted, poetically strange narratives with intertwined conceptual links of culturally diverse materials and different artistic disciplines.
As part of her artistic journey to date, Ho has reinvented the ancient Chinese seven-stringed guqin into a hybrid Plexiglas ”Slow Qin”. Continuing exploration is the result of a process of building an open-ended new instrument and interface that is engaged in her interdisciplinary art practice.
Echo Ho is currently a PhD candidate at the Tangible Music Lab in Linz. Between 2011 and 2013 Ho was a Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Graduate School for Arts and Sciences at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 2007 to 2014 Ho was lecturing at The Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Ho’s works have been performed or presented at the He Xiangning Art Museum Shenzhen, Center-A Vancouver, ISEA 2010 Germany, ZKM Karlsruhe, among others.