Chi Po-Hao: The Man Who Walked from Economics into Sound, Using Algorithms to Ask One Question — Are You Actually Listening?

Chi Po-Hao: The Man Who Walked from Economics into Sound, Using Algorithms to Ask One Question — Are You Actually Listening?

30-second overview: Chi Po-Hao (Pohao Chi), born 1989, is a sound artist, composer, and curator. He graduated from National Taiwan University's Department of Economics, earned a master's in music (MMus) from Goldsmiths in London, and in 2021 won the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in Visual Arts — the top prize — as an MIT Art, Culture and Technology graduate.¹ In 2014 he contributed synthesizer to Hello Nico's EP Floating City (浮游城市)², and that same year his work Rhythm of Space was selected for the Taipei Arts Award.³ In 2017 he founded Zone Sound Creative.⁴ He has completed seven international residencies (V2 Rotterdam, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, FACT Liverpool, 18th Street Arts Center Santa Monica, and others). In 2025, he presented Reciter(s) 2.0 at C-LAB's DIVERSONICS sound art festival — an AI-synthesized voice piece that caused audiences' smartphones to collectively recite a text.⁵ He measures the world with GPS, algorithms, and machine-synthesized sound, yet he always returns to the same question: does the act of "listening" still have a will of its own?

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

Late October 2025. The second-floor performance space of the C-LAB Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab library in Taipei. A sound art festival called DIVERSONICS is in mid-run.⁶ One of the works is titled Reciter(s) 2.0, by Chi Po-Hao.

Audiences enter the space, take out their phones, scan a QR code, open a web page — and then things begin to happen. Each person's phone automatically recites the same piece of text using an AI-synthesized voice. When there are only three people in the room, the sound is synchronized; when there are thirty, the tiny timing offsets between phones accumulate — and a recitation that began as orderly starts to shift, layer, and interfere with itself. The text is still the same text. But the sonic configuration of the entire space has become something entirely different.

The work statement reads:

"This piece draws inspiration from Cisco's widely known 2000 commercial 'Are You Ready?' In the advertisement, children of different ethnicities repeatedly ask, 'Are you ready?' — conveying a hopeful vision of high connectivity and globalization. Today, voice assistant applications have superficially fulfilled that cross-border promise, but these synthesized voices have also moved from novelty to daily habit, becoming a kind of 'habituated medium,' hovering on the edge of obsolescence."⁵

Reading this passage in 2025, there is not a trace of the techno-optimism of the early 2000s. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, ChatGPT voice mode — synthesized sound has gone from unsettling novelty to background noise. We have stopped listening to it. Chi Po-Hao's response is not commentary but installation: he brings a synthesized voice into simultaneous presence across multiple phones in the room, where it offsets, layers, and disintegrates — forcing people to listen again to what that sound actually is.

This work is his most recent public presentation, from 2025. But its logic can be traced back eleven years, to when he had just graduated from NTU's economics department and was submitting a work to an art prize.

II. The Person Who Walked from Quantitative Thinking into Sound

Chi Po-Hao was born around 1989 in Taipei. He attended Jianguo High School, then entered National Taiwan University's Department of Economics.⁷ This was, on the surface, a path toward finance, research, or policy work. But during college he joined the popular music club, picked up guitar and arranging, and began uploading self-recorded songs online.⁷

After graduating, he did not enter finance. In 2013 he was selected for the National Culture and Arts Foundation's (NCAF) "Overseas Arts Travel Program," with a research project on sound art institutions in the UK and France.⁸ In 2014 he joined the indie band Hello Nico as synthesizer player, and they released the EP Floating City — which reached No. 1 on StreetVoice and won Best EP at Singapore's Freshmusic Awards the following year.²

If the story ended here, Chi Po-Hao might have become another composer who started in indie music and continued making pop. But that same year, 2014, he did something else: he completed a residency at V2_Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, and submitted a work called Rhythm of Space (空間的節奏) to the Taipei Arts Award — where it was selected.³

What did that work look like? He recorded 24 hours of ambient sound in an exhibition space, then played it back at 100x speed while keeping the pitch constant. A projected clock ran in the space. When viewers stood in a specific location, the playback speed slowed to normal — the sound shifted from a dense pulse of "a day compressed into fourteen minutes" to the living sounds of "one second is one second."

The work's core was a question of timescale — turning ambient soundscape from something humans can ignore as background into something humans must confront as foreground. In a 2017 interview with the NCAF online journal, he quoted Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer:

"Our ears have no lids — we are destined to keep hearing. But that does not mean we have open ears."⁹

This sentence explains why his entire subsequent body of work looks scattered but is in fact consistent — from Hello Nico synthesizer arrangements to V2 sound installations, from spatial sound work to AI voice web pieces, he has always been doing one thing: prying apart "hear" (the physiological reception of sound) and "listen" (the active will to attend), and letting people make the choice again.

III. European Circuit: From Rotterdam to Liverpool

Between 2014 and 2018, Chi Po-Hao was almost always in motion between residencies. After V2 Rotterdam, he went to Paris — spending 2015 to 2016 in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts, commonly known as the "Paris Western House."¹⁰ In 2016 he went to Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijón, Spain⁷, and that same year spent a short period in Hong Kong through a Bamboo Curtain Studio exchange with Asia Art Archive.⁷

This period roughly overlaps with his time pursuing a master's in music (MMus) at Goldsmiths, University of London.¹¹ The Goldsmiths music department is a major center for sound studies, electronic music, and experimental music in Europe — he was not merely collecting a degree, but genuinely immersing himself in an academic tradition that takes "sound as a research object."

From July to September 2018, he received a grant from the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts for a residency at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool.¹² FACT is one of Britain's earliest institutions committed to digital art and new media exhibition; he used the time there to develop the foundational research behind a series of subsequent sound-politics works.

During those five years of movement, Chi Po-Hao also founded his own studio in June 2017: Zone Sound Creative (融聲創意). (Taiwan company records show a registration date of June 16, 2017, with Chi Po-Hao as representative.)⁴ Running residency-based work in Europe while simultaneously establishing a legal entity in Taipei capable of taking on projects and participating in public programs — this dual structure would persist well past his MIT graduation.

IV. MIT, Three Years: From the ACT Lab to the Schnitzer Prize

In 2019, Chi Po-Hao enrolled in the Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) master's program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.¹³ ACT is a very small and unusual interdisciplinary program within MIT's School of Architecture and Planning — it trains not engineers, nor pure artists, but research-based practitioners capable of moving among art, culture, and technology.

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

First, Song of Distances: a web-based work in which users' phone GPS positions are mapped to nodes on a map, with an algorithm generating personalized melodies based on distances between the user and other nodes.¹⁴ The orientation of the phone affects the spatiality of the sound; as more users participate collectively, the generated soundscape grows more complex. This work is the origin point of his subsequent series of "participatory web works that generate collective sound" — Reciter(s) 2.0 carries its DNA.

In August 2021, he and Mexican classmate Chucho Ocampo Aguilar jointly won the MIT Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in Visual Arts — Chi Po-Hao taking first place, Ocampo second.¹ The Schnitzer Prize is one of MIT's highest honors for visual arts students; first prize carries a $5,000 award. That same year, his work Plantfluencer Gazing was selected for the Ars Electronica 2021 "Stranger Senses" Garden Program¹⁵ — one of Europe's oldest electronic art festivals.

Then there was 3000 Years Among Microbes. Co-created by Chi Po-Hao, Rae Hsu (徐叡平), and Mexican artist Nancy Valladares, the work explores the boundary between humans and microorganisms through the concept of the "holobiont" — they visited Taiwan's National Space Organization and a NASA moon simulation base, collecting microbial samples, and placed the assumption of "anthropocentrism" into a microorganism-centric frame for re-examination. The work was exhibited at Xinban Gallery in Taipei from January 14 to February 27, 2022, with support from Taiwan's Ministry of Culture.¹⁶

V. Back in Taiwan: Aeolian Harps, Santa Monica, and Back to Taipei

From July to September 2022, Chi Po-Hao received Ministry of Culture support for a residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica.¹⁷ 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 adapted it into a device capable of transmitting sound to a remote receiver via shortwave signal. Strings of different materials and thicknesses, scattered across city streets, mountain areas, and desert, are set in motion by wind and produce different timbres; the signals are transmitted back to a receiving unit via radio.

In November 2023, this system gave rise to Interfaces of the Invisible, exhibited at the city museum in Querétaro, Mexico.¹⁸

During this period he gradually shifted his focus from individual creation to institutional collaboration and curating. He served as Taiwan's international representative for the British Council's Convergence arts festival⁷, and listed two curatorial projects on his personal website: Convergence — Artistic Explorations from Nature to Society and Rescaling the World.¹⁹ He began to occupy a dual identity — sound artist making his own work, and simultaneously a curator and producer helping other artists enter international networks.

The 2025 Reciter(s) 2.0 is a product of this dual identity: the work itself is his creation, but in execution he has a stable collaborative team — programmer Luo Jo-yu (駱若瑀), producer Lai Hui-chia (賴慧珈) — allowing Zone Sound Creative to genuinely function as an independent unit capable of carrying projects at international scale.⁵

VI. Not "I'll Die Without Making Art"

In the 2017 NCAF interview, when asked about the source of his creative motivation, his answer was:

"It's not that I'll die without making art."⁹

Heard from the lips of someone who graduated in economics, holds two international master's degrees, won MIT's top visual arts prize, has completed seven international residencies, and runs his own company, this sounds incongruous — because the resume itself looks like that of someone who has taken artistic creation as a life mission. But his meaning was not a denial of the importance of creation; rather, he was emphasizing his distance from that identity:

"My work rarely has my own shadow in it."⁹

This is the key to understanding Chi Po-Hao. His works are not autobiographical, not emotional projection, not works that place "I" at the center. His works are systems: a GPS-melody-generating web page, a space that records ambient sound and plays it back at 100x speed, a cluster of thirty smartphones reciting in unison — he builds these systems, then steps back, and lets the audience enter on their own.

In that same interview he also said:

"At the start, my imagination of music-making was very narrow — I thought creation meant a song."⁹

From "a song" to "a system" — that is the trajectory from Hello Nico synthesizer player to MIT ACT.

His personal website homepage reads:

"work with sound, everyday technology, and interactive systems, often exploring participatory forms that encourage people to connect and reflect"¹⁹

Within this English self-description is one key word: participatory. Almost all of Chi Po-Hao's works require the audience to perform an action — take out a phone, stand in a specific location, connect to a web page, scroll through an interface — before truly entering the work. He uses algorithms, GPS, AI-synthesized sound, and sensors to measure the world, but the purpose of that measuring is not to replace human perception. It is to compel people to make a choice about perceiving.

Our ears have no lids. But whether we have ears willing to listen — that is another matter entirely.

Further Reading

• Lin Ching-Yao — Also a sound/technology artist in the C-LAB ecosystem, moving from Tai Chi Cloud Hands into generative art
• Aluan Wang — Digital artist, co-founder of akaSwap, same generation but oriented toward NFT curatorial infrastructure
• Hello Nico — Chi Po-Hao's early indie band identity, synthesizer player on the 2014 Floating City EP
• Taiwan New Media Art — Sound art's place within the context of Taiwan's new media art

References