Pohao Chi: From Economics into Sound, Using Algorithms to Ask One Question: Are You Actually Listening?

Pohao Chi: From Economics into Sound, Using Algorithms to Ask One Question: Are You Actually Listening?

30-second overview: Pohao Chi, born in 1989, is a sound artist, composer, and curator. A graduate of the Department of Economics at National Taiwan University, he later earned a master's degree in music from Goldsmiths, University of London, and in 2021, while completing his master's at MIT Art, Culture and Technology, won first prize in visual arts at the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize¹. In 2014, he participated as the synthesizer player on Hello Nico's Floating City EP²; that same year, his work Rhythm of Space was shortlisted for the Taipei Arts Awards³, he received support from the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts for a residency at V2* in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and he was selected for the 11th Cloud Gate Dance Theatre "Wanderer Project"⁴. In 2015, he traveled through Qinghai, Gansu, and Ningxia, crossing more than a thousand kilometers along the Hexi Corridor⁵, followed by more than ten international and local residencies, including Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, LABoral in Spain (2016), Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong (2016), Taoyuan's Xianguang 2nd Village (2017), Artists Space PRACTICE in New York (selected through Taipei Artist Village, 2018), the Hangzhou Cross-Strait Cultural Exchange Center (2018), FACT Liverpool in the United Kingdom (2018), Medialab Prado in Madrid (2021), 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles (2022), and Arts@ITRI at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (2025)⁶. In 2017, he founded the studio Zone Sound Creative. In 2025, he presented _Reciter(s) 2.0* at C-LAB's sound art festival DIVERSONICS⁷, and participated in Polyphony, the Taiwan Pavilion curated by C-LAB at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, with Cybernetics of Waterscape, shown at POSTCITY⁸⁹. In March 2026, he participated in the IRCAM Forum Workshops in Paris with Reciter(s)¹⁰; from April 24 to June 28 of the same year, the immersive digital artwork Life in Motion was exhibited at Jerry Moss Plaza at The Music Center in Los Angeles¹¹. He uses algorithms, GPS, and AI-synthesized voices to measure the world, yet he keeps asking the same question: whether the act of "listening" still has a will of its own.

1. In the Age of AI Voice Assistants, Asking How Humans "Listen"

In late October 2025, on the second-floor performance and exhibition space of the library at C-LAB, the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, a sound art festival called DIVERSONICS was under way¹². One of the works was titled RECITER(s) 2.0, by Pohao Chi.

Visitors entered the space, took out their phones, scanned a QR code, opened a webpage, and then something began to happen. Each person's phone automatically recited the same passage of text in an AI-synthesized voice. When only three people were present, the voices were orderly; when thirty people were present, the tiny timing deviations among the phones accumulated, and what had originally been a regular recitation began to fall out of alignment, layer itself, and interfere with itself. The text remained the same, but the sonic configuration of the entire space had changed completely.

The work description states:

"This work is inspired by Cisco's widely known 2000 commercial, 'Empowering the Internet Generation.' In the advertisement, children of different ethnicities repeatedly asked, 'Are you ready?' conveying an optimistic vision of deep connectivity and globalization. Today, voice-assistant applications appear to have fulfilled the promise of crossing national borders, yet these synthetic voices have also gradually shifted from novelty into everyday life, becoming a kind of 'habitual medium' while hovering on the edge of obsolescence."⁷

Read in 2025, this passage contains not a trace of the technological optimism of the 2000s. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, ChatGPT voice mode: synthetic voices have gone from startling novelties to background noise, and we have stopped listening to them. Chi's response is an installation rather than a commentary: he makes a synthesized voice appear collectively across multiple phones on site, fall out of sync, and collapse, forcing people to listen again to what this voice actually is.

This work was one of his most important public presentations of 2025, but its line of thought can be traced back eleven years, to when he had just graduated from National Taiwan University's Department of Economics and was submitting his work to art awards.

2. From Quantitative Thinking into Sound

Pohao Chi was born around 1989 in Taipei. He attended Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, then entered the Department of Economics at National Taiwan University⁶. By all appearances, this should have been a path toward finance, research, or policy analysis. But during university he joined the hot music club, encountered guitar and arrangement, and began uploading songs he recorded himself to the internet⁶.

After graduating, he did not enter the finance industry. Beginning in 2011, he became a contracted songwriter for Neutron Culture, the second-generation incarnation of Magic Stone, and formally worked as a commercial music professional for three years. This identity was established earlier than his later identity as an artist-in-residence⁶. In 2013, he was selected for the National Culture and Arts Foundation's "Overseas Arts Travel Project," traveling abroad to research sound art institutions in the United Kingdom and France¹³. In 2014, he joined the independent band Hello Nico as a synthesizer player and released the EP Floating City, which topped the chart on StreetVoice and won Best EP of the Year at Singapore's Freshmusic Awards the following year².

2014 marked a larger turning point. He was selected simultaneously by three Taiwanese institutions with completely different characters: the 14th Taipei Arts Awards, for the shortlisted work Rhythm of Space³; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts' "Digital Art Talent Overseas Residency Project," which supported his residency at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media in the Netherlands⁶; and the 11th "Wanderer Project" of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre⁴. Three paths began at once: one through Taiwan's most important visual art award, one through a national museum residency grant, and one through a youth international travel grant from an independent dance company.

What did he make during the V2 residency? The work was called Rhythm of Space. He recorded the exhibition site's environmental soundscape over twenty-four hours, then played it back on site at a speed one hundred times faster while keeping the pitch fixed. There was a projected clock in the exhibition space. When visitors stood in specific positions, the playback speed slowed to normal, and the sound shifted from a dense pulse in which "a day was compressed into fourteen minutes" back to the everyday sound in which "one second is one second." The core of the work was temporal scale: turning an environmental soundscape from a background that humans can ignore into a foreground they must confront.

When the National Culture and Arts Foundation's online magazine interviewed him in 2017, he quoted the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer:

"Our ears have no lids, and are destined to keep hearing; but this does not mean that we have a pair of open ears."¹⁴

This sentence explains why his entire later creative path seems scattered but is in fact consistent. From synthesizer arrangements for Hello Nico to sound installations at V2, from spatialized sound to AI voice web works, he has been doing only one thing: prying apart "hear", the physiological reception of sound, and "listen", the active will to attend, so that people can choose again.

But the true point of origin for this opposition between "hear" and "listen" was not the Taipei Arts Awards, nor V2 Rotterdam. It was on the Hexi Corridor in 2015.

3. The Wanderer and Cité: From Northwest China to Europe (2014-2018)

In 2015, he set out under the theme "Exploring Folk Songs and Rituals of Northwest China," traveling in succession through the three provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, and Ningxia, and crossing more than a thousand kilometers along the Hexi Corridor⁵. The original plan was to systematically document local folk music: hua'er folk songs, Lanzhou guzi narrative singing, and Tibetan and Yugur song and dance. Performances took place alongside the journey: at Yutao Workshop in Beijing, Yinchuan, and Lanzhou, there was a performance called "North of Many Sounds."

But midway through the trip, he found that his tools had failed. Before that point, his primary ways of making music had been synthesizers, Max/MSP, and digital operations: methods built on the premise that "I control sound through an interface." Northwest China had no interface. What it had was wind along the Hexi Corridor, a performance in the basement of Yutao Workshop, the calls of a Sufi mosque in Yinchuan, prayer wheels in Sunan Yugur Autonomous County, and a school square in Xiahe County where Tibetan students reenacted the history of the People's Liberation Army. These things could not be synthesized, nor could they be cleanly field-recorded as data.

In the second half of the journey, he set aside his original plan for systematic documentation and placed immediate exchange ahead of recording. In a text he wrote in 2018 reflecting on the trip, he described the true gains of the experience as "calmly accepting futile attempts" and "returning to the simple identity of a listener"⁵.

Seen within the context of his work over the following decade, this shift means far more than a residency reflection. It was the point at which he moved from being "a person making music on synthesizers" into an embodied path of "bodies and sonic locality." All of the later works that take "listening" as their core method, from Repetend and Lightscape to Hertz Playground and Reciter(s) 2.0, share the same methodological premise: the choice made in 2015 by someone who put down the synthesizer and walked along the Hexi Corridor.

From 2015 to 2016, he continued with a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, commonly known in Taiwan as Paris Cité¹⁵. During his time in Paris, he completed Repetend, recording twenty-four hours of environmental sound at each of eight sites around the city gates and surrounding rural outskirts of Paris, then compressing and layering them at 256 times normal speed so that "the rhythm of an entire day in one place" became a sonic structure that could be compared and read. Exhibited at Jed Voras Gallery, the work was an early mature example of his methodological line of using temporal scale as compositional material.

From November 4 to December 11, 2016, he undertook a residency at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain, completing Lightscape, a work composed of audiovisual installation and three-channel video. It transformed nighttime urban lightscapes, including the flicker of streetlights, car lights, and illuminated signs, into generative music, using routes on a map as scores and the lightscapes along the way as the music itself¹⁶. That same year, through an exchange program between PageNEXT and Asia Art Archive, he spent a short residency in Hong Kong⁶. During this period, he was also studying in the MA Music program in Studio Composition at Goldsmiths, University of London, bringing together the academic traditions of early European electronic music, free improvisation, and sound studies with the residency practice he had already developed¹⁷.

2018 was an intensive year. From July to September, he received a second grant from the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts' "Technology and Art Talent Overseas Residency Project" and undertook a residency at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, one of the earliest institutions in the United Kingdom devoted to digital art and new media exhibitions¹⁸. That same year, through the PRACTICE program selected by Taipei Artist Village, he undertook a residency at Artists Space in New York⁶, and also participated in a residency at the Hangzhou Cross-Strait Cultural Exchange Center⁶.

Around the same time, in June 2017, he founded the studio Zone Sound Creative in Taipei. This dual-track structure, individual residency-based creation plus a legal entity capable of taking on public projects, would continue after his graduation from MIT.

4. The Dual Track of Theater Applications: From Macau and New York to NTCH (2016-2019)

After the 2015 Wanderer Project, Chi's working mode became two parallel tracks. One was his personal sound installations made during European residencies; the other was the substantial amount of sound design, interactive systems, and music director work he took on in Mandarin-language theater and dance circles.

The Macau line was the densest part of this period. For Imprint Macau Dance Association's Well Come in 2016, he handled music and sound design. In 2017, he served as music director for Playground of Years at the Macao Cultural Centre, the installation theater work Typhoon of 1874 at the Old Court Building of the Macao Arts Festival, based on the devastating typhoon that struck Macau in 1874, and the immersive theater work Years Dance Voice at the Macao Cultural Centre⁶.

Theater collaborations in Taiwan also became intensive from 2017 onward: Nan Yi Musical Ensemble's Industrial City at Weiwuying; JPG Percussion Lab's ReDefine at NTU Center for the Arts; Slowisland Theatre Group's The Woman in the Clouds at the Iron Rose Arts Festival; 3.14159 Synesthesia Costume Experimental Performance; the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Macau Dance Exchange at Shenzhen Grand Theatre; and Tong Gen Sheng's Returning Light into the Sound Forest at Zhongshan Hall. In 2018, through the PRACTICE program at Artists Space in New York, he pushed this performance-practice line into the United States: PRACTICExWind was performed at Artists Space. In 2019, he was commissioned composer for Yunshu Ya Ji's Song of Forgetting Words, performed in Guangfu Auditorium at Zhongshan Hall as part of the Taipei Traditional Arts Festival. That same year, he handled sound design and music for both Dance Forum Taipei's 30th-anniversary work Wendy and Chiu Yu-Hsuan's Emiko.

On the surface, this period seems far removed from the sound installations he made at V2, Paris Cité, and LABoral, but the underlying method was the same: sound as a variable within a system rather than as background score. In theater, it would respond to performers' movements, spatial acoustics, and audience positions; in installations, it would respond to GPS, sensors, and network signals.

It was precisely the theatrical muscle built up during this period that led the National Theater and Concert Hall to select him in 2019 as a short-term resident artist for its "Art Base Project"¹⁹. This was a flagship resource offered by NTCH to young creators, and also the first formal entry point through which he moved from being a "sound artist in the visual art world" into Taiwan's performing arts system. The following year, Hertz Playground was selected for NTCH's "NextTheater" project, turning mobile browsers into collective instruments and allowing thirty phones to form a walk-in ensemble space in the National Concert Hall's audiovisual corridor. From Macau theater to NTCH, this track completed a loop in 2019-2020.

5. Three Years at MIT: From the ACT Lab to the Schnitzer First Prize

In 2019, Chi went to the United States to enter the master's program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology²⁰. This is a very small and unusual interdisciplinary program within MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, training research-based creators who can move among art, culture, and technology, rather than engineers alone or pure artists alone.

During his three years at MIT, he did several things.

First was Song of Distances: a web-based work in which, after users opened a webpage, the GPS position of their phones was mapped onto nodes on a map, and an algorithm generated personalized melodies according to the distance between each user and other nodes²¹. The orientation of the phone affected the spatiality of the sound; the more users participated collectively, the more complex the system-generated soundscape became. This work was the starting point for his later series of works that "use participatory webpages to generate collective sound." The lineage of Reciter(s) 2.0 begins here.

In August 2021, he and his Mexican classmate Chucho Ocampo Aguilar jointly won MIT's Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in Visual Arts, with Chi receiving first prize and Ocampo second prize¹. The Schnitzer Prize is one of MIT's highest honors for current visual art students, with a first-prize award of USD 5,000. That same year, his work Plantfluencer Gazing was selected for Ars Electronica 2021's "Stranger Senses" Garden Program²². This was his first selection for one of Europe's oldest electronic art festivals.

Then came 3000 Years Among Microbes. Co-created by Chi, Rae Hsu, and Mexican artist Nancy Valladares, the work used the concept of the "holobiont" to explore the boundary between humans and microbes. They interviewed Taiwan's National Space Organization and NASA lunar simulation facilities, collected microbial samples, and placed the assumption of "anthropocentrism" into a microbial frame for reexamination. The work was exhibited at New Taipei Gallery in Taipei from January 14 to February 27, 2022, with support from Taiwan's Ministry of Culture²³.

The same year, he received Ministry of Culture support for a Medialab Prado residency in Madrid, where he completed Plastic Soup: Invisible Matters, and connected a multi-year network of collaboration with Mexican artists and groups, including dériveLAB, BEMA, and Chucho Ocampo. This Latin American line would later extend in 2022-2023 to Interfaces of the Invisible at the Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro, Mexico.

6. Returning to Taiwan: Aeolian Harps, Mexico, and Institutional Residencies

From July to September 2022, Chi received support from Taiwan's Ministry of Culture for a residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, United States²⁴. There, he developed a system called the "Aeolian Harp Radio Installation." An aeolian harp is an ancient instrument that produces sound through the movement of natural wind; he modified it into a device that could transmit sound remotely through shortwave signals. Strings of different materials and thicknesses were moved by wind in city streets, mountain areas, and deserts, producing different timbres, with the signals sent back to the receiving end by radio.

In November 2023, this system developed into Interfaces of the Invisible, exhibited at the Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro, Mexico²⁵.

During this period, he gradually shifted his focus from individual creation toward institutional collaboration and curation. He served as Taiwan's international representative for the British Council's Convergence festival⁶, and also began to take on the role of curator: in 2023 he curated Rescaling the World for the annual meeting of the Taiwan STS Association at C-LAB, and in 2024 he curated Convergence: Artistic Explorations from Nature to Society, commissioned by the National Science and Technology Council²⁶. For the National Science and Technology Council, part of Taiwan's national science and technology governance system, to commission an artist as curator is rare in Taiwan's technology-art environment. The opportunity came directly from the previous year's STS annual meeting exhibition, where a deputy minister of the NSTC personally came to see his work.

In 2025, he became an Arts@ITRI artist-in-residence at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, a formal signal of movement from the art world toward the technology research and development system.

Reciter(s) 2.0 in 2025 was the product of this dual identity. The work itself was his own creation, but in execution he had a stable collaborative team, with programming by Lo Jo-Yu and production by Lai Hui-Chia, allowing the studio "Zone Sound Creative" to operate as an independent unit capable of undertaking projects on an international scale⁷.

7. Polyphony, Paris, Los Angeles (2025-2026)

From 2024 to 2025, he began to develop the theme of "water" systematically. From the 2023 solo exhibition Damp Resonances at the Hong Foundation, to Symbiotic Sense(s) and Hydrospheric Sketch at the 2024 RIXC Art Science Festival in Riga, and then to Cybernetics of Waterscape in 2025, he selected Xizhi in New Taipei, a town long afflicted by flooding, as a long-term site, assembling residents' flood memories, river structures, pumping-station systems, and sensor data into an ongoing urban sound essay. This time, he did not set out to systematically collect. This was the answer, ten years later, that the person who had put down the synthesizer on the Hexi Corridor in 2015 gave to himself.

From September 3 to 7, 2025, Cybernetics of Waterscape was selected for Polyphony, the Taiwan Pavilion curated by C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab and organized by the Ministry of Culture, and was exhibited at POSTCITY during the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria⁸. Polyphony was the first major curatorial collaboration after C-LAB and Ars Electronica Linz GmbH & Co KG signed an MOU in January 2025. It gathered 14 Taiwanese artists and groups, with Chi's work one of six POSTCITY visual art pieces⁹. This was his second selection for Ars Electronica, following his first in 2021 during his MIT period.

From March 18 to 21, 2026, the extended version of Reciter(s) 2.0, titled Reciter(s), was selected for the IRCAM Forum Workshops in Paris and presented at IRCAM and the Centre des Arts d'Enghien-les-Bains¹⁰. IRCAM is France's national center for sound and music research, founded in 1977 by the composer Pierre Boulez. The Forum Workshops are the institution's annual forum open to the global sound, technology, and composition communities. For Chi, this was the moment when the Reciter series moved from a 2019 web experiment into the main arena of the sound-technology academic community.

On April 24, 2026, the immersive digital artwork Life in Motion, co-created by Chi and Zone Sound Creative, opened at Jerry Moss Plaza at The Music Center, the performing arts center of Los Angeles County, with an exhibition period running through June 28¹¹. The Music Center is one of the most important performing arts institutions in the United States. Its campus covers roughly five hectares, has a history of more than sixty years, includes Walt Disney Concert Hall, and is a landmark of performing arts in Los Angeles. This was the center's first outdoor immersive exhibition directly co-curated with a Taiwanese artist. According to a Central News Agency report, Beata Calinska, associate vice president of digital innovation at The Music Center, said she discovered Chi's work online and finalized the collaboration only after several video meetings with the Taiwan Academy in Los Angeles²⁷. Life in Motion integrates real-time generative visuals and interactive sensing technology. In a small space separated from the outside by black curtains, the environment changes according to visitors' gestures and bodily positions; the images move from cellular growth to planetary terrain, constantly changing and evolving every second²⁷.

From the Hexi Corridor to Linz, Paris, and Los Angeles, these may look like four unrelated locations. But if one returns to the moment in 2015 when he put down the synthesizer, one finds that this trajectory has actually had only one direction.

8. It Is Not That You Will Die If You Do Not Create

When he looked back in 2018 on his 2015 Wanderer Project journey through Northwest China, Chi wrote two descriptions that many people overlook. He admitted that he had originally wanted to become a field collector of ethnomusicology, but after completing the Hexi Corridor journey, he described the trip's true gains as "calmly accepting futile attempts" and "returning to the simple identity of a listener"⁵.

Seen within the context of his work over the following decade, with algorithms, GPS, AI-synthesized voices, and sensors stacked up one after another, it becomes clear that he has never really been doing "technology art." What he is doing is closer to the opposite: using a whole set of technological tools to place himself back in that position on the Hexi Corridor in 2015, where he decided "no longer to collect, only to listen."

In a 2017 interview with the National Culture and Arts Foundation, he once said a line that has been widely quoted:

"It is not that you will die if you do not create."¹⁴

Coming from someone who graduated from economics, earned two international master's degrees, won MIT's first prize in visual arts, undertook more than ten international residencies, and has his own company, this sentence sounds jarring, because the résumé itself looks very much like that of someone who treats creation as a vocation. But in the same interview, he added: "My works rarely contain my own shadow."¹⁴

This is the key to understanding Pohao Chi. His works are not autobiographical, not emotional projections, and not centered on the "I." His works are systems: a webpage that generates melodies through GPS, a space that reads environmental sound and fast-forwards it one hundred times, a cluster that makes thirty phones recite at once. He establishes these systems, then steps back, allowing viewers to enter on their own.

The homepage of his personal website states:

"work with sound, everyday technology, and interactive systems, often exploring participatory forms that encourage people to connect and reflect"
(using sound, everyday technology, and interactive systems as creative media, often exploring participatory forms that encourage people to connect and reflect)²⁶

The keyword participatory in this English self-description is not merely a design term, but the working posture he adopted after returning from the Hexi Corridor. He uses algorithms, GPS, AI-synthesized voices, and sensors to measure this world, but the purpose of measurement is to compel people to make perceptual choices, not to replace human perception.

Our ears have no lids. But whether we have a pair of ears willing to listen is another matter.

Further Reading

• Lin Ching-Yao — another sound/technology artist from the C-LAB ecosystem, moving from taiji cloud hands into generative art
• Wang Shin-Jen (Ar Luan) — digital artist and co-founder of akaSwap; of the same generation, but oriented more toward NFT curatorial infrastructure
• Hello Nico — Chi's early independent-band identity; synthesizer player on the 2014 Floating City EP
• Taiwan New Media Art — the place of sound art within the context of Taiwan's new media art

References