Taiwan Soundscape

30-Second Overview

Close your eyes: can you hear Taiwan? At 6:30 in the evening, the melody of “A Maiden's Prayer” slowly approaches from the garbage truck, and everyone in the alley files out carrying trash bags. Late at night by a temple gate, Beiguan gongs and drums thunder, while the neon lights of an electronic flower car flash before the gods. In the mountains, Bunun people sing Pasibutbut, often called eight-part polyphony, to pray to the heavenly deity for an abundant millet harvest; it is one of the oldest known forms of polyphonic singing in the world.

Taiwan's sounds are not merely background noise. They are a living cultural code. Each sound carries history, memory, and identity.

Key sounds:

• 🚛 Garbage truck music: a globally unique urban sonic ritual
• 🏯 Temple festival music: Beiguan, Nanguan, and the drum formations of the Eight Generals
• 🏔️ Indigenous polyphony: Bunun Pasibutbut (four-part singing that produces eight-part overtones)
• 🛵 The scooter sea: an engine symphony in the place with the world's highest scooter density
• 🌙 Night market hawking: a sonic theater of everyday popular economy

Why It Matters

Every city has its own sonic fingerprint. New York has the screech of the subway and taxi horns; Tokyo has platform departure melodies and convenience-store door chimes. But Taiwan's soundscape has one distinctive feature: it simultaneously contains ancient Austronesian chant, the temple-festival gongs and drums of Han migrants, school-song traditions left from the Japanese colonial period, and the inventive sounds of modern urban life.

This is not one layer of sound. It is four hundred years of sonic archaeology.

To understand Taiwan's soundscape is to enter Taiwan's history by ear. And these sounds are disappearing: some are being swallowed by urbanization, while others are being lost through cultural rupture. Recording them is not only cultural preservation. It is rescue.

The Sonic Codes of Urban Everyday Life

Garbage Truck Music: The World's Most Civilized Way to Take Out the Trash

Unique in the world: collecting garbage with classical music

The two classic pieces played by Taiwan's garbage trucks are DNA-level memories for every Taiwanese person:

1. “Für Elise” — Beethoven's most widely recognized piano miniature, mainly used by garbage trucks in northern and central Taiwan
2. “A Maiden's Prayer” — an 1856 salon piece for piano by the Polish composer Tekla Bądarzewska, usually played by garbage trucks in southern Taiwan

Interestingly, where you live in Taiwan determines which piece you hear. This may be the only case in the world where classical music delineates regional identity. People from the north find it strange to hear “A Maiden's Prayer”; people from the south pause for a moment when they hear “Für Elise.”

Since Taipei implemented its “keep garbage off the ground” policy in 1997, garbage truck music has become a collective memory for Taiwanese people. This is not just garbage collection. It is a miniature community ritual performed every day: neighbors meet at the alley entrance, trade gossip, and take out the trash along the way.

Why classical music? When the Environmental Protection Administration selected the pieces in the 1980s, it considered that the music needed to be “easy to recognize, not unpleasant, and audible over distance.” Classical piano pieces fit perfectly: their melodies are simple, their frequencies carry well, and they do not involve copyright problems.

International perception: This may be the Taiwanese urban spectacle most often filmed by foreign YouTubers. “You collect garbage with classical music?” Yes, and everyone in Taiwan finds it completely normal.¹

The Scooter Sea: A Symphony of Fourteen Million Engines

Taiwan has more than 14 million registered scooters, giving it the highest scooter density in the world. The instant a red light turns green, the sound of dozens of scooters starting at once is the everyday soundtrack of every Taiwanese commuter.

This sound is changing. The spread of electric scooters, such as Gogoro, has made the city a little quieter. Yet that collective takeoff, the “vroom” of engines starting together, may become a nostalgic sonic memory within ten years.

Election Trucks: The Decibels of Democracy

Whenever election season arrives, campaign vehicles fitted with giant loudspeakers move through streets and alleys, repeatedly broadcasting candidates' names and numbers at maximum volume. This is probably the loudest democratic practice in the world.

Taiwanese people both love and hate it: it is unbearably noisy, but it is also the most direct expression of freedom of speech. During the martial-law period, even putting up a poster could get you arrested.

Sacred Sounds: Temple Festivals and Religion

Beiguan: Rock Music at the Temple Gate

Beiguan is the most common traditional music heard at Taiwanese temple festivals. It is loud, fiercely rhythmic, and emotionally intense. If rock music is defined as “expressing the strongest emotions at the loudest volume,” then Beiguan is Taiwan's oldest rock music. Beiguan includes instrumental music, such as paizi and xianpu, as well as vocal music, including opera and xiqu songs. Its sung texts use a form of “standard Mandarin pronunciation”: not Taiwanese Hokkien, but a Mandarin system with archaic phonological features.

Historical context: Beiguan was introduced to Taiwan around the Qianlong and Jiaqing reigns of the Qing dynasty, and its name arose in contrast to Nanguan, which came from Quanzhou. Interestingly, the origins of its singing style can be traced to Pujiang luantan in Zhejiang and Xiqin opera in Guangdong, rather than directly to Fujian; today, no theatrical genre identical to Beiguan can be found in Fujian. In Taiwan, Beiguan developed two major schools, Xipi and Fulu, corresponding to “xuan” and “yuan” in amateur music clubs. Rivalry between the two schools, known as pinguan, sometimes escalated into armed fights. In Taiwan, disputes over musical taste could draw blood.

Modern situation: Beiguan faces a serious crisis of transmission. Young people find it too loud and too rustic, and the number of learners has fallen sharply. Ironically, international ethnomusicologists marvel at Beiguan's complex banqiang system and qupai structures. It shares roots with the xipi and erhuang of Peking opera and has been jokingly called “Peking opera's country cousin.”

Nanguan (Xianguan/Nanyin): The East's Oldest Chamber Music

In sharp contrast to Beiguan's ferocity, Nanguan is delicate, elegant, and slow-paced. Originally called xianguan, it developed in Quanzhou and was brought to Taiwan by southern Fujian migrants. A typical “upper four instruments” ensemble consists of a horizontally held pipa, sanxian, dongxiao flute, which preserves the Tang-dynasty shakuhachi measurement of one chi and eight cun, erxian, and clappers. In 2009, under the name Nanyin, it was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.²

Sound characteristics: Nanguan's melodic lines are extremely long; a single phrase can extend for several minutes. In performance, the sound “emerges from strings and blends forward”: the string instruments, especially the pipa's tremolo, begin the sound, and the bamboo tone of the dongxiao then dissolves into it. The parts support and continue one another while remaining individually discernible. This is music that requires stillness in order to be heard. In an age of scarce attention, the first thing Nanguan teaches is to slow down.

Cultural roots: Nanguan preserves traces of music since the Han and Wei periods. Its ensemble format can be traced back to Han-dynasty xianghe songs, in which “silk and bamboo alternate in harmony, while the timekeeper sings.” Its instrument forms and musical structures are also closely related to Tang and Song great suites. Scholars call it a “living musical fossil,” and it is praised as “clear tones across a thousand years.” In Taiwan, Lukang is the most important center of Nanguan.

What makes it unique: The Nanguan pipa still preserves the Tang-dynasty horizontal playing position, while the pipa in other musical genres has long since shifted to vertical playing. That posture alone is a thousand-year time capsule.

Electronic Flower Cars: Collision Between the Sacred and the Secular

This is Taiwan's most magical-realist soundscape: on flower cars at funerals or temple festivals, pole dancers perform under neon lights while electronic synthesizers play music that mixes Taiwanese-language songs, electronic dance music, and Buddhist scripture.

Cultural logic: It may look absurd, but there is serious folk logic behind it. Liveliness is for the gods to see, and it is also the deceased's final party. “Send them off in style.”

International attention: Electronic flower cars have been the subject of features by international media such as the BBC and Vice, and are regarded as one of the most distinctive visual and auditory spectacles in Taiwanese folk culture.

Layers of Chanting and Ritual Sound

Morning and evening services in Buddhist monasteries, chanted scriptures in Daoist ritual assemblies, gong-and-drum formations during Mazu pilgrimages: religious sound is the deepest layer of Taiwan's soundscape. In the city, you may hear church bells, a temple's wooden fish, and the call to prayer from a mosque at the same time. This is Taiwan's religious pluralism, expressed through sound.

Indigenous Sounds: The Memory of the Land

Bunun Pasibutbut (Prayer for the Millet Harvest): The Misnamed “Eight-Part Polyphony”

Bunun Pasibutbut is often called “eight-part polyphony,” but the name is in fact a beautiful misunderstanding. In reality, it is four-part singing (mabungbung, maidadu, mandaza, mahosngas) that produces rich natural overtones by strengthening chest resonance and guttural vocal techniques, creating the effect of eight parts on a spectrogram. It is not eight people singing eight parts. It is four parts singing a miracle of physics.

In 1952, the Japanese musicologist Kurosawa Takatomo submitted a recording of this song to UNESCO, astonishing the international ethnomusicological world.³

Sound characteristics: Six to twelve men, always an even number, form a circle with arms linked and gradually rise from a low pitch using the vowels “o,” “e,” “a,” and “i.” There is no conductor and no score. Everything depends on listening to one another and achieving harmony through the blending of voices. When the overtones stack correctly, you hear more parts than there are people. This is one of the most mysterious acoustic phenomena the human voice can produce.

Cultural meaning: Pasibutbut is a ritual for communicating with the heavenly deity Dihanin. It is sung only each year from January to March, during the millet harvest season. The more harmonious the singing, the more pleased the heavenly deity will be, and the more abundant that year's millet crop will be. Today, it circulates only among the Isbukun and Takbanuaz communities of the Bunun; not all Bunun villages sing it.

Origin legends: While hunting, the people heard the resonance of hollow giant trees and wild bees, echoes from waterfalls, or wind through pine forests and bamboo groves. They believed these were blessings from the heavenly deity and imitated them to create the song. Different villages have different versions of the origin story, but all point to the same thing: this song comes from the sounds of nature.

Amis: Song and Dance at the Harvest Festival

The Amis harvest festival, Ilisin, is one of the grandest celebrations among Taiwan's Indigenous peoples. In several consecutive days of song and dance, antiphonal singing between a lead singer and the group reveals the dynamic relationship between the collective and the individual.

Sound characteristics: The lead singer improvises, and the group responds. The lyrics may be improvised, while the melody remains relatively fixed. This singing method is also very common in African music. The similarities between Austronesian and African musical practices remain a subject of ethnomusicological research.

Paiwan and Rukai: Double-Pipe Nose Flutes

The Paiwan and Rukai double-pipe nose flute, lalingedan, is one of the very few instruments in the world played with the nose. One pipe plays the melody, while the other provides a sustained drone, creating a distinctive acoustic effect.

Cultural context: In Paiwan tradition, the nose flute was an instrument reserved for the nobility and was closely connected to the class system. It was used at important occasions such as weddings and funerals, and the player's breath was regarded as an extension of the soul.

Tao: Clapping Songs and the Ocean

The Tao people of Orchid Island are Taiwan's only oceanic people, and their music is inseparable from the sea. The clapping songs of the flying-fish season and the work songs sung while building boats all respond to the rhythms of the ocean.

The writer Syaman Rapongan has said, “The memory of the waves is longer than human memory.” Tao music is the sonic version of that sentence.

Natural Sounds

Spring Thunder and Plum Rains

Taiwan's climate has a vivid seasonality in sound: the first thunderclap of spring, torrential rain striking corrugated-metal roofs during the plum rain season, and the eerie few seconds of silence before an afternoon summer thunderstorm. Anyone in Taiwan who has lived under a corrugated-metal roof knows that rain can be so loud you cannot hear what the person next door is saying.

Cicadas

Taiwan has more than 60 species of cicada, and summer cicada song can reach 90 decibels, about as loud as a vacuum cleaner. Different elevations have different cicada species, forming a vertically distributed sonic spectrum: Formosan giant cicadas on the plains, Meimuna takasagona at mid-elevations, and Lyristes esakii at high elevations, each with its own timbre and rhythm.

Sounds of Taiwan's Endemic Species

The song of the Taiwan hwamei is widely recognized as one of Taiwan's most beautiful bird calls. The bark-like call of the Reeves's muntjac often startles hikers. At night in the mountains and forests, owl calls intertwine with frog song to create a nocturnal soundscape unique to Taiwan's woodlands.

Disappearing Sounds

The Horn of the Knife Sharpener

The knife sharpener riding a bicycle, sounding a distinctive horn and calling through the streets, “Sharpening—scissors—,” was once one of the most familiar sounds in Taiwan's lanes and alleys. With modernization, this sound has nearly disappeared.

Hardware Store Hawking Broadcasts

Hardware store sales broadcasts recorded in Taiwanese Hokkien, such as “Come, come, everything on special,” were once part of the background sound of township streets in Taiwan. Today, they can be heard only in some traditional markets and rural areas.

Sounds of the Radio Era

Before television became widespread, the radio was the sonic center of Taiwanese households. Taiwanese-language radio dramas, gezai opera broadcasts, and puppet-theater dubbing shaped the auditory memory of an entire generation. Today, they exist only in the memories of older people.

The Tones of Taiwanese Hokkien Are Being Lost

Taiwanese Hokkien has eight tones, seven in actual use, making it one of the everyday languages with the richest tone systems in the world. But with the implementation of Mandarin-language education, younger generations' Taiwanese Hokkien ability has declined sharply. When a language disappears, what disappears is not only vocabulary, but also the distinctive sonic texture and musicality of that language. The rise and fall of Taiwanese Hokkien speech is itself a melody.

🚇 MRT Soundscape Project

In 2018, Harvest Music carried out a distinctive field-recording project along the Taipei MRT: the “MRT Soundscape Project.” They followed the MRT network and recorded the most representative sounds of everyday life near each station. These eight-second recordings are like a map of Taipei traveled by ear.

📝 Curator's Note: Every MRT station has its own sonic DNA. The chanting and divination blocks at Xingtian Temple, the buzz of tattoo machines in Ximending, the Lunar New Year goods hawking on Dihua Street: these are not “noise,” but evidence that a city is alive.

🎧 Listen: Taipei MRT Soundscape (recorded by Harvest Music in March 2018)

Contemporary Sound Experiments

Sound Art

Taiwan has an active sound art scene. Platforms such as C-LAB (Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab), ET@T Lab, and the Lacking Sound Festival continue to promote the creation and presentation of sound art.⁴ Works by artists such as Wang Fujui, Yao Chung-han, and Chang Yung-ta transform Taiwan's environmental sounds into contemporary artistic language.

Field Recording

More and more sound workers are engaging in field recording in Taiwan to document sounds that are disappearing. From high mountain forests to coastal intertidal zones, from old markets to industrial districts, these recordings are not merely archives. They are auditory cultural assets.⁵

Interactive Sound Installations

Taiwan's new media artists have made notable achievements in interactive sound installations. By combining sensors, real-time computation, and spatial audio, they transform audiences' bodily movements into sonic experiences, making “listening” into an act of whole-body participation.

Soundscape Preservation Projects

The Taiwan Soundscape Association, working with resources integrated by the Ministry of Culture, continues to promote the recording and preservation of “endangered soundscapes.” The hawking voices of traditional markets, the zhentou music of temple festivals, and the machine sounds of long-established handicraft industries: sounds disappearing because of urban renewal or industrial decline are preserved through field recording.

Astonishing Facts

• 🔢 Garbage truck music is unique in the world: Taiwan is the only country in the world that uses classical music to remind residents to take out the trash. The two pieces have been used for more than 25 years and have become the most powerful trigger of national collective memory.
• 🔢 “Eight-part polyphony” is actually four-part: Bunun Pasibutbut is four-part singing that produces an eight-part effect through natural overtones. After Kurosawa Takatomo submitted it to UNESCO in 1952, it astonished the international musicological world.
• 🔢 Nanguan is a living fossil: It preserves musical elements from the Tang and Song periods and is one of East Asia's oldest surviving chamber-music traditions. In 2009, it was inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage.
• 🔢 Taiwanese cicadas reach 90 decibels: Summer cicada song is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner, and more than 60 cicada species form one of the world's densest cicada soundscapes.
• 🔢 Taiwanese Hokkien has seven tones: It is one of the everyday languages with the richest tone systems in the world. Every change in tone changes meaning; the language itself is music.
• 🔢 The gongs and drums of Mazu pilgrimages: Every year, the Baishatun Mazu pilgrimage on foot can mobilize more than 100,000 people at its peak. Wherever the procession passes, firecrackers and gongs and drums stretch for several kilometers. This is Taiwan's largest moving soundscape event.
• 🔢 The layered sounds of Taiwanese night markets: A night market averages 80 to 90 decibels of simultaneous background sound: bubbling oil, hawking voices, electronic sound effects from game stalls. The night market soundscape is the densest sonic compression file of everyday popular life in Taiwan.
• 🔢 C-LAB Lacking Sound Festival: The Lacking Sound Festival at Taipei's former Air Force Command Headquarters is one of Asia's most important experimental sound art festivals. Each year, it attracts international sound artists to perform in Taiwan, making Taiwan an important node for sound art in Asia.

Further Reading:

• Wang Fujui — Founded NOISE, Taiwan's first experimental music label, in 1993; the origin point of the lineage of Wang Fujui, Yao Chung-han, and Chang Yung-ta mentioned in this article's “Sound Art” section
• Taiwanese Indigenous Musical Traditions — Traditional sounds such as Bunun eight-part polyphony and Paiwan mouth harps form the oldest layer of Taiwan's soundscape
• Taiwan KTV Culture — From stage shows to private rooms, KTV is one of the most common artificial sound sources in Taiwan's night soundscape; the singing of five people leaking out from a KTV room forms a distinctive sonic trace of Taiwanese nights
• The Development of Taiwanese Hip-Hop and Rap — From urban basements to the KKBOX charts, the sonic texture of rap has changed the soundscape layers of Taiwanese popular music

References