Taiwan Soundscape: Garbage Trucks Playing Classical Music, MRT Birdsongs, and an Island Often Heard but Rarely Listened To

At 6:30 in the evening, a piano melody drifts closer from the far end of the alley. It is Beethoven’s Für Elise, or the Polish composer’s A Maiden’s Prayer. You do not stop to think, “This is classical music.” You put down whatever you are doing, grab that bag of trash, and rush downstairs. This is Taiwan’s most punctual urban alarm clock. For people in most countries, a garbage truck is noise; for Taiwanese people, it is a melody your body responds to before your mind does.

Every day, we “hear” this island: the classical music of garbage trucks, the melody of MRT trains entering stations, the cries of night-market vendors, campaign trucks shouting “tòng-suán,” and cicadas outside the window on summer nights. But we rarely “listen” to them. This article asks a question raised by a master’s student in soundscape studies: if we listened carefully to these sounds that are treated as background, or even legally treated as noise, might we discover that we have long been constructing our understanding of Taiwan through “how we listen”?

30-second overview: A soundscape is an experience constructed by “how people listen,” not an objectively existing “sound environment.” Taiwan has two completely opposing attitudes toward sound: on one hand, it uses the Noise Control Act to treat sound as something to be reduced and eliminated; on the other, figures such as Fan Chin-hui, Wu Tsan-cheng, and Lee Ming-tsung treat sound as a cultural asset to be listened to, preserved, and designed. The sharpest miniature of this tension occurred on Taipei Metro in 2015: in the same year, within the same system, train-arrival music was transformed into artwork through compositions by Summer Lei and CinCin Lee, while the door-closing warning tone was “de-musicalized” and changed back to birdsong because, for visually impaired passengers, “being able to distinguish it” matters more than “sounding pleasant.”

You Think You Are Hearing, but You Are Actually Constructing Taiwan Through Modes of Listening

Let us first clarify a common misunderstanding.

In the Chinese-speaking world, the concept of “soundscape” is often attached to the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who is said to have invented it. This is actually a beautiful misunderstanding. Schafer himself made clear in interviews that he did not coin the word soundscape; he credited urban-planning scholar Michael Southworth with that contribution.¹ What Schafer truly did was lead the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s, produce The Vancouver Soundscape in 1973, and publish The Soundscape in 1977, disseminating an entire method for listening to the world.² He was the popularizer, not the inventor.

Within Schafer’s method, one term is especially apt for understanding Taiwan: soundmark: a sound unique to a place, one that tells you immediately, “I am here.”

This connects to the soundscape master’s student’s most central point. A soundscape is not the sound waves captured by a microphone, but an experience constructed by “how people listen.” For the same garbage-truck music, the environmental protection bureau hears, “It is time to carry out the collection route”; a foreigner who has just moved to Taiwan hears, “Why is someone playing piano music in the street?”; and a Taiwanese person who has worked away from home for a long time and happens to hear it on a visit back hears an entire childhood. The sound is the same sound, but the understanding is completely different. The difference lies in the different ways each person listens.

📝 Curatorial view: We are accustomed to treating sound as “part of the environment,” as if it objectively exists there and has nothing to do with us. Soundscape studies reverses that assumption: a soundmark is a landmark not because of how loud it is or how pleasant it sounds, but because a group of people have collectively learned that “this sound means this thing.” Garbage-truck music was originally merely a vehicle alert in Germany. After crossing the ocean to Taiwan, several generations heard it as the shared understanding that “it is time to take out the trash.” The sound did not change; the listeners did. This is also why understanding Taiwan can begin with sound: which sounds you understand reveals whether you are from here.

How an “Unverifiable” Legend Became the Nation’s Trash-Taking Alarm Clock

Return to that most representative sound.

The two pieces most often played by Taiwan’s garbage trucks are Beethoven’s Für Elise and A Maiden’s Prayer by the Polish composer Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska, the latter published in Warsaw in 1856.³ One is a famous piece from music textbooks; the other is a nineteenth-century salon miniature. Neither was written for taking out the trash, yet in Taiwan both are heard as signals for the same act.

As for how these two pieces came to be mounted on garbage trucks, the answer is somewhat surprising: no one really knows. The Chinese Wikipedia entry for “garbage truck” states frankly that the matter is “currently subject to many competing accounts and cannot be verified.”⁴ The most widely circulated version says that Hsu Tzu-chiu, then head of the Taiwan Provincial Government’s Department of Health, heard his daughter practicing piano and thought the melody could be used to remind people to take out the trash. But in another version of the same story, the protagonist is Tu Tsung-ming, Taiwan’s first medical doctor.⁵ Different versions also disagree about whether the daughter was practicing A Maiden’s Prayer or Für Elise. There is an even more deflating explanation: the sealed garbage trucks first imported from Germany to Taiwan in the 1960s already came with Für Elise built in, while A Maiden’s Prayer came from Japanese EPSON music boxes imported into Taiwan.⁵ In other words, the melody may not have been carefully chosen by anyone at all; it may simply have been bundled with imported equipment.

These versions contradict one another, but listening to them as legend is actually the more honest, and better, story. An urban legend without a standard answer is itself vivid evidence of how soundscapes are “collectively constructed.” The important part was always what came after: 20 or 30 million people later all agreed that “when you hear this, go downstairs.” Who first pressed that note matters far less.

And this system of managing trash through melody has been astonishingly effective. Taiwan’s recycling rate is as high as 55%, making it one of the countries with the highest recycling rates in the world.⁶ Behind that number is the daily action of tens of millions of people hearing that piano melody in the evening and walking out of their homes with sorted trash and recyclables. A piece of music whose origin “cannot be verified” supports a world-leading system of environmental governance.

In the Same Year, in the Same System, Sound Was Both Aestheticized and Functionalized

If garbage trucks are a sound Taiwanese people “passively hear,” then Taipei Metro was the first time someone in Taiwan deliberately designed how an entire city should be heard.

The story begins with a sociologist. Taipei Metro’s train-arrival music was the result of the “Taipei Soundscape Project,” initiated by sociology professor Lee Ming-tsung.⁷ Beginning in 2015, the project was gradually implemented. Lee’s idea was clear: through the music heard while moving through the city, passengers would “construct their own urban character, memory, and identity.”⁷ In other words, he wanted arrival music to become a soundmark through which Taipei residents recognized their own city.

The lineup was impressive. Each of the four main lines had its own composer: the Tamsui-Xinyi Line, or Red Line, had Summer Lei; the Bannan Line, or Blue Line, had Golden Melody, Golden Bell, and Golden Horse score winner CinCin Lee; the Zhonghe-Xinlu Line, or Orange Line, had Golden Melody Award producer Chen Chien-chi; and the Songshan-Xindian Line, or Green Line, had Chou Yueh-cheng.⁷⁸ The first piece, composed by Summer Lei, began playing on the Tamsui-Xinyi Line on December 19, 2015. The in-carriage melody Wind Rises, which reminds passengers about transfers and terminal stations, was also written by Chou Yueh-cheng.⁸ Beyond arrival music, the project also composed ambient station music for Dongmen Station, Longshan Temple Station, Songshan Airport Station, Xiangshan Station, and Taipei Arena Station. In total, it drew on 447 works from 12 countries and regions.⁸ An MRT system was produced like a giant album.

But in the very same year, within the very same system, something happened in the opposite direction.

While the project was busy adding music to every corner, Taipei Metro “de-musicalized” the door-closing warning tone for trains departing stations. Since ROC year 91, or 2002, the Zhonghe-Xinlu Line had used a melodic tune for door closing. In 2015, the entire system was adjusted back to two warning sounds: first, birdsong to remind passengers that the doors were about to close; second, a siren similar to an ambulance warning tone to indicate that the doors were closing.⁹ The reason was not aesthetic, but functional. Taipei Metro said the adjustment was meant to allow visually impaired passengers and travelers from around the world to identify the warning “more clearly and conveniently.”¹⁰

This is the sharpest point in the whole matter. In the same year, in the same MRT system, sound was pushed in two opposing directions at once: arrival music was turned into art, with leading composers invited in, for the sake of pleasant sound, urban aesthetics, and identity; the door-closing warning tone was functionalized, with melody removed and replaced by birdsong, for the sake of clarity, safety, and ensuring that no one would be caught by the doors because something was “too pleasant to distinguish.”

📝 Curatorial view: This contrast is valuable because it compresses the tensions between “hearing vs. listening” and “aesthetics vs. function” into the same system in the same year. If you look only at the arrival music, you might think Taiwan is a place willing to treat sound as art. If you look only at the door-closing warning tone, you might think Taiwan is pragmatic enough to sacrifice pleasantness. Both are true, because sound never serves only one need. For visually impaired passengers, birdsong that is “not beautiful enough but distinguishable” matters more than any composer’s melody. This reminds us that “who is listening” determines how a sound should be designed. The politics of soundscape is hidden in these invisible trade-offs.

Announcement languages lie along the same axis of “who is heard.” Taipei Metro originally followed Article 6 of the Act for the Guarantee of Language Equality in Mass Transportation Broadcasting, making announcements in four languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, and English.¹¹ In 2024, it expanded to six languages, in this order: Mandarin, English, Japanese, Korean, Hoklo (Minnan), and Hakka.¹² The order is noteworthy: Hakka was placed last, after even Japanese and Korean, and this ordering itself prompted discussion. A city’s decision about whose words are heard first and whose words are placed last is never a neutral technical decision.

From Real Street Cries to a Banned Song: How Sound Becomes Culture

The MRT is a designed soundscape, but Taiwan’s older and wilder soundmarks grow in night markets and temple forecourts.

Walk into a Taiwanese night market, and Taiwan Panorama’s description is vivid: “the sounds of traffic, human voices, and vendors’ cries are noisy and clamorous.”¹³ There are more than 300 night markets across Taiwan.¹³ Each one is a dense cluster of sound: the sizzle of griddles, the electronic beeps of claw machines, and shopkeepers calling out prices at the top of their voices. To tourists, it is loud. To locals, it is the sound of being alive.

One of Taiwan’s most moving soundscape stories is precisely how a real street-vending cry became a widely sung standard in Tâi-gí (Taiwanese). In 1949, Chang Chiu Tung-song wrote a song originally titled “Selling Meat Zongzi,” later renamed “Hot Meat Zongzi.” Its lyrics describe the situation of a person selling meat zongzi on the street late at night to make a living amid postwar hardship.¹⁴ The song later became Kuo Chin-fa’s signature piece, but its fate was tortuous: it was once listed as a banned song by the Government Information Office of the Executive Yuan¹⁴ because the sorrow embedded in that vending cry was considered, in a certain era, “too tragic” and insufficiently positive.

A real street cry was first written into a song, then banned by the authorities, and finally became a melody that several generations of Taiwanese people could hum. Sound here completed an entire trajectory: from the sound of lived reality, to an object of regulation, to cultural memory itself.

The temple-festival soundscape followed a different path: new things grew out of tradition. Techno San Tai Zi is a religious performance culture that emerged in Taiwan, mixing electronic music, local culture, and the San Tai Zi figure from traditional temple parade troupes, whose prototype was the “Daxian-weng-a” temple-festival figure.¹⁵ Its best-known moment came at the opening ceremony of the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung, when San Tai Zi stepped onto the international stage to electronic beats.¹⁵ The traditional sounds of gongs and drums in temple processions were mixed with nightclub-style electronic drums, and no one thought it conflicted. This is precisely the character of Taiwan’s soundscape: it cares less about purity than vitality.

The soundscape of election season is the most direct, and also the one people both love and hate most. Whenever elections arrive, campaign vehicles take to the streets, with loudspeakers repeatedly shouting “tòng-suán, tòng-suán.” “Tòng-suán” is a Tâi-gí homophone for “elected”; in Mandarin pronunciation, it sounds close to “dong suan,” literally “frozen garlic,” chosen purely for sound rather than meaning, with a slightly joking tone.¹⁶ Is this sound noisy? Very. That is why the law regulates it too. Campaign loudspeakers are governed by the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act: Article 54 stipulates that loudspeakers may not create noise, and Article 56 prohibits public campaign activities before 7 a.m. or after 10 p.m.¹⁷ A joking Tâi-gí homophone supports the liveliest soundscape of Taiwan’s democracy, and also the one most closely watched by law.

When Someone Decides to “Save” Sound: Taiwan’s Listening Movement

By this point, a clear line of contradiction emerges: Taiwan uses law to regulate these sounds as noise, while these same sounds are actually landmarks by which we recognize home. The people who truly laid out this contradiction and chose to stand on the side of “listening” were a group of individuals.

The first name is Fan Chin-hui.

She is a nature writer and field recordist. Since 1997, she has produced and hosted the program Nature Notes on National Education Radio.¹⁸ For decades, she has carried recording equipment into Taiwan’s mountains, forests, streams, and valleys, collecting the sounds of insects, birds, wind, and water one segment at a time. In 2020, she won the Broadcasting Golden Bell Award for Education and Culture Program Host for Nature Notes.¹⁹ She wrote Saving Silence: A Field Recordist’s Journey of Exploration, a book that even came with a CD of natural soundscapes, allowing readers not only to read silence but to hear it;¹⁸ she also created a picture book titled The Call of the Silent Trail.¹⁸

In March 2015, Fan Chin-hui called for the establishment of the Taiwan Soundscape Association.²⁰ What this association does is precisely the mirror image of the Noise Control Act: the Ministry of Environment divides sounds into control zones and seeks to reduce them, while the association treats sound as a cultural asset that needs to be listened to and preserved.

📝 Curatorial view: The same society can build two completely opposite systems around the same thing. On one side is the Noise Control Act, which divides sound into four categories of control zones and specifies the permitted levels at different times. On the other is the soundscape association, which treats sound as a disappearing heritage worth rescuing. This is not a sign of Taiwan’s split personality. After all, “sound” is by nature both disturbance and landmark. The key is always how you listen to it. What Fan Chin-hui does is essentially invite society as a whole to change its ears: do not rush to classify sound as noise; first stop and listen to whether there is something inside it that you thought had disappeared, but that is in fact still there.

The association’s most concrete achievements are two milestones related to “silent trails.” These two are easily conflated, but in fact they operate at different levels.

The first is domestic. In 2018, witnessed by American acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, the Cueifong Lake Circular Trail in Taipingshan, Yilan, became Taiwan’s first silent trail.²¹ Along this trail is a cypress forest called the “Ordovician Tundra Area,” so quiet that it measures only about 25 decibels,²⁰ almost approaching an anechoic chamber. On an island accustomed to garbage trucks, MRT trains, night markets, and campaign vehicles, finding a place at 25 decibels is itself a luxury.

The second is international. On World Listening Day, July 18, 2022, Quiet Parks International certified the Cueifong Lake Circular Trail as the world’s first Quiet Trail.²¹ Fan Chin-hui also serves as Asia regional director for Quiet Parks International. From Taiwan’s first in 2018 to the world’s first in 2022, Taiwan turned “quiet” from a local experiment into an international benchmark.

Some Collect the Silence of Mountains and Forests; Others Collect the Clamor of Cities

If Fan Chin-hui collects the silence of mountains and forests, Wu Tsan-cheng collects the everyday clamor of cities.

Artist Wu Tsan-cheng formally began his first sound work, Nightingale, in 2011 and created the Taiwan Sound Map Project, collecting everyday sounds from across Taiwan into a map one entry at a time. He recorded more than 10,000 entries before temporarily stepping away from the project in December 2021.²² The platform he used was a free sound map developed by a German artist, radio aporee :: maps;²³ in the early days, he even marked the locations of sounds through Google Maps.²³ Open that map, and you can click any corner of Taiwan to hear a market, train station, temple forecourt, or alleyway captured by someone at a particular moment. This is another kind of Taiwanese history: not written in words, but preserved in sound.

It is worth noting that this idea of “understanding Taiwan through listening” has already developed into formal academic research. In 2024, the College of Communication at National Chengchi University produced a master’s thesis titled Establishing Connections Through Listening: The Life Journey of Soundscape Workers, written by Wang Mei-fen and advised by Liu Hui-wen.²⁴ One sentence in the thesis abstract is almost an annotation to this entire article: “Amid environmental change, changes in the soundscape correspond to the contexts of human survival.”²⁴ How sound changes reflects how we live.

Understanding Taiwan Does Not Mean Finding One “Representative Sound”

Return to that piano melody drifting closer from the alley at 6:30 in the evening.

It is easy to assume that knowing a place through sound means identifying its “most representative sound”: garbage trucks? The MRT? Night markets? “Tòng-suán”? But the question posed by this master’s student in soundscape studies actually turns the matter around completely. The point is not “what is Taiwan’s representative sound,” but two harder questions: Which sounds have we become accustomed to ignoring? And whose sounds are heard?

Once these two questions are asked, the whole island sounds different. Taipei Metro’s willingness to replace a pleasant melody with birdsong for visually impaired passengers allows a group of people who are easily overlooked to “hear”; placing Hakka last in the announcement-language sequence pushes a language into the corner of an ordering system. Fan Chin-hui’s rescue of 25-decibel silence and Wu Tsan-cheng’s collection of more than 10,000 entries of disappearing everyday sound are both acts of resistance against “ignoring.” They preserve for us the sounds we clearly hear every day but never seriously listen to.

So the next time the garbage truck’s A Maiden’s Prayer drifts past the mouth of the alley, the next time an MRT arrival melody sounds on the platform, the next time you walk into a night market and are enveloped by vendors’ cries, perhaps you can pause for half a second and become aware of what you are hearing. In that instant, sound changes from the background you habitually ignore into evidence that “I am in Taiwan; I am home.” Understanding Taiwan does not have to begin with an answer. It can begin with an act of serious listening.

Image Sources

• Lead image, Shilin Night Market: TWShiLinNightMarketRichy2.jpg, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.
• Taipei Metro train: Taipei Metro train for Xiangshan leaving Zhongyi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.
• Cueifong Lake: 2019 Cueifong Lake.jpg, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.
• Techno San Tai Zi: Kaohsiung Liugui Techno San Tai Zi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.

References

Further Reading

• Taiwan Soundscape — Taiwan’s sound maps and urban listening from another angle
• Taiwanese Temple Festivals and Parade-Troupe Culture — The fuller parade-troupe soundscape and folk-cultural context behind Techno San Tai Zi
• History of Taiwan’s MRT Development — The story of the system that carried the soundscape project
• Night Market Culture — Another facet of that cluster of “traffic sounds, human voices, and vendors’ cries”
• Taiwanese Tea Ceremony and Everyday Aesthetics — Another line in how Taiwanese people turn everyday sensory experience into culture