Donghoon Gang is an artist, composer, and researcher based in Germany and Korea.
Through diverse media works that cross boundaries between exhibition and performance, visual and auditory, he dissolves borders between sculptural language and music, exploring integrative and alternative forms of expression.
Based in ethnomusicology and music psychology, he examines how sound and music are consumed and instrumentalized or misused for specific purposes in history and society. Utilizing acousmatic techniques that minimize visual information and maximize auditory imagery, he explores the experimental expansion possibilities of invisible media.
Recently, he has been tracing the influx of Western music into East Asia, driven by imperialist desires and the pursuit of modernity. He examines the resulting musical hierarchies and their colonial transformation, re-evaluating the remaining vestiges through a post-colonial lens.
[KR]
Addendum to Axioms for a Sonic Ontology, 장한길
[EN]
[Addendum to Axioms for a Sonic Ontology, Han Gil Jang]
Taiwan, 1922
…when ethnomusicologist Hisao Tanabe (尚雄 田辺) asked a Japanese colonial official in Taiwan whether the aboriginal population had ongaku, “the officer’s reply was categorical: ‘they have songs but no ongaku’”.[1]
Berlin, 1885
In 1885, the Berlin-based philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf attended a special performance by a troupe of nine Nuxalk musicians, held at the Institute of Geosciences and Geography (Institut für Geowissenschaften und Geographie) at the University of Halle[2]. Stumpf took up his pen, attempting to transcribe their music onto a staff, but found himself unable to make out the notes by ear. In his 1886 paper, Lieder Der Bellakula-Indianer (Songs of the Bella Coola Indians), he recalled: “In the actual performance, however, the entire piece is sung at a lower pitch and, at the same time, with such extreme passion and noise that it is impossible [for European ears] to discern all the parts of the melody without prior knowledge of it.” This is a common scene in modern literature, of Europeans encountering “natives” outside of Europe and reacting with bafflement to the “sounds” they produced. An 1801 diary entry by Alexander von Humboldt viscerally reflects the shock and confusion he felt upon first hearing the sounds made by the boatmen (bogas) of Colombia’s Magdalena River as they rowed[3]. The Austrian musicologist Eduard Hanslick, heavily influenced by Humboldt’s brother Wilhelm, went so far as to assert:
When South Sea Islanders rattle with wooden staves and pieces of metal to the accompaniment of incomprehensible howling, that is natural music, because it is no music at all[4].
Unlike Humboldt and Hanslick, who hastily concluded that the music of non-Europeans was not music, Stumpf believed that, with careful listening, he could discern musical intervals even in “Nuxalk music.” “[At] least in a musical context”, he wrote, “we should not be too quick to speak disparagingly of so-called ‘savage’ or ‘uncultivated’ peoples[5]”. After the performance, Stumpf negotiated with the booking agent and arranged a private session with one of the troupe’s singers. Over four days, for one to two hours each day, he requested solo vocal performances. Listening for dozens of hours in an environment stripped of both choral and instrumental accompaniment, Stumpf attempted his transcription. Gradually, coherent melodies began to emerge. Later, when the troupe performed in public, Stumpf compared the full performance with his transcribed score and confirmed the existence of a melody that had been “hidden” behind the unfamiliar vocal techniques and timbre. After collecting and analyzing the melodies he had transcribed, Stumpf argued that Nuxalk music was constructed on a systematic five-tone scale and could not be dismissed as mere “natural music.”
Based on this experience, the renowned psychologist with expertise in what would be called today psychoacoustics, concluded that the act of listening was not merely subjective but a culturally formed habit. He sharply criticized the tendency of Europeans like Hanslick and Humboldt to hastily judge the music of cultures they deemed “primitive” as “natural music” or “not music” by astutely pointing out their propensity to listen to non-European music with a European ear. According to his argument, for a European to properly listen to the music of the other, the human ear itself had to be retuned. And for this, it was necessary to listen to as much non-European music as possible and become attuned to it.
Vancouver, 1976
The term “European ear,”which refers to a cultural bias in the perception of music, was used not only by Carl Stumpf but also fondly by his students, such as Erich von Hornbostel. Yet, must unbiased, prejudice-free audition apply only to music? What about sounds not typically deemed musical? This very question was actively engaged by Western musicians with the rise of post-war experimental music in the latter half of the 20th century. The most famous attempt to realize Henry David Thoreau’s statement that “there is music in every sound” is John Cage’s 4′33″. For that exact duration, Cage had the audience listen to all the ambient sounds that occurred in a concert hall where nothing was being “played.” Of course, this kind of listening need not be confined to a concert hall. The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, a pioneer in the field of “sound studies” who coined the concept of soundscape, argued that the subjective and cultural biases of human listening apply not just to music, but to the entire world of sound.
Obviously we listen in different ways to different things, and there is much evidence to suggest that not only individuals but societies listen differently… Why do we focus on certain sounds and merely overhear others? Are some sounds discriminated against culturally so that they are not heard at all?[6]
Like Stumpf, Schafer argued that conscious learning could expand one’s listening capacity beyond familiar music to include the entire sonic environment. This conviction shapes his very definition of noise. “Noise pollution results when man does not listen carefully,” Schafer writes. “Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore[7].” Conversely, this means that any sound, even one perceived as noise, can be understood by its type and source if one simply directs focused listening toward it. Therefore, Schafer’s proposed countermeasure to “noise pollution” was not “a negative approach” like soundproofing or noise-cancellation, but its very opposite: the active cultivation of our ability to listen more attentively. Through pedagogical methods like his widely-adopted “soundwalk,” Schafer demonstrated how to describe sounds as they occur in real time. Not unlike the critical gaze, he believed this practice of critical listening was essential for acoustic design, arguing that, “Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the soundscape[8].” For Schafer, the goal of expanding our acoustic horizon was not simply to accept more sounds, but to compose our sonic world with intention and care, giving it both form and beauty.
Critical Listening
Donghoon Gang’s practice begins with a simple premise: he brings sound into an exhibition space and asks the audience to listen. While this may seem obvious, it carries two important implications. First, by moving sound out of conventional performance venues, he seeks to break from established modes of “music appreciation” and instead interrogate the very act of listening itself. Second, once a sound is moved to this indeterminate space, it is detached from its original context. To be truly heard, it demands a deconstruction of our established notions of “music,” “sound,” and “noise.” To approach the work merely in terms of musical genre such as “ambient” or “minimalist,” therefore, is to miss the point entirely.
So what is the Critical Listening that Gang’s work explores? It is fundamentally different from the ideal forms of listening conceived by Stumpf or Schafer, and to understand this difference, one must first examine their deeply ingrained Eurocentric biases. For Schafer, the distinction between “sounds to be preserved” and “sounds to be eliminated” was remarkably clear. He did not advocate for identifying noise because “noise, too, contains music,” as Cage or Thoreau might suggest. Rather, he sought to cultivate this ability in order to distinguish, capture, and ultimately eliminate the sources of unwanted sound.
Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough and we will know why we must eliminate them.[9]
Schafer also maintained a clear division between music and non-musical sound. His position is revealed most starkly in the following two passages. First is from a 2011 interview where he distinguishes his work as a composer from his work as an acoustic designer. The second is from his 1961 essay where he makes a judgement on Indigenous music.
I don’t think musical composition is identical with soundscape research. I think that there is a relationship, as I said before. We wanted music to be beautiful and original and attractive, just as the soundscape should be beautiful and attractive and original. But there is always an egocentric drive when you compose a piece of music. I’m a composer too, but I keep my compositions separate from the work that I do in the acoustic environment, and I think most composers should[10].
The Eskimos are such an astonishingly unmusical race that the composer really has to wring his material to make it musically presentable. There is a marked similarity between an Eskimo singing and Sir Winston Churchill clearing his throat[11].
Next, let us examine Carl Stumpf. In his work with the Nuxalk, Stumpf pursued a “scientific listening” that he believed was free from the aesthetic judgments of Western music. Paradoxically, he overlooked the fact that the very conditions for this “objective” listening were themselves woven from Eurocentric musical priorities. For Stumpf, music was the conscious construction of pitch, with interval and harmony as its most crucial elements. This is precisely why, when faced with a Nuxalk performance that included percussion and multiple vocalists, he chose to isolate a single singer. He attempted to discern the pitch by actively excluding the timbre and the percussive sound. In doing so, Stumpf remained unaware that his own tacit criteria for what constituted a musical element were entirely premised on a Eurocentric view.
The “Critical Listening” that Donghoon Gang’s work demands is fundamentally different. It refers to a mode of audition that not only encompasses all sounds, whether categorized as music or noise, but goes further to expose the cultural paradigms—or “prejudices”—that give rise to such categories in the first place. For example, his work Not Quite My Tempo! (2023) calls into question the criteria of rhythm by which Nazi Germany defined “unruly” (entartet) music versus “healthy” music[12]. Meanwhile, Ruhezeit (2022), which deals with Germany’s famous “quiet hours” law, prompts the listener to consider the cultural ambiguity of standards for “quietness” or “a reasonable level of noise.” By taking up the very question of what constitutes noise as material for his compositions, Gang inverts Schafer’s concept of soundscape and reveals the ambiguity in Schafer’s own binary of “noise” versus “beautiful sound.” The audience is no longer required merely to listen attentively and discern, as Schafer would have it. Instead, we are asked to capture the cultural biases tacitly embedded in the act of listening itself.
Today, with a Eurocentric view of music so deeply permeated throughout our culture, capturing the biases embedded in the act of listening is exceedingly difficult. Gang’s work Octave (2023), for example, deals with the emotions evoked by different musical chords. We are often told that a chord with a minor third is sad, while one with a major third is cheerful. In truth, this association is a product of cultural learning, not an inherent or natural response[13]. Much like the famous “Kuleshov Effect,” the emotion evoked by a particular chord is as open to diverse interpretation—or as ambiguous—as the expression on a face in a photograph[14].
In fact, this ambiguity is embedded in the very term “music” itself. The modern Sinographic term for music, yinyue (音樂; eumak in Korean; ongaku in Japanese), is a translation of music, musique or Musik. These terms derive from the ancient Greek μουσική (mousikḗ), a broad concept that encompassed not only instrumental and vocal performance but also dance and poetry. The narrower, modern concept of “music” only began to spread in East Asia through Meiji-era Japan. Prior to this, there was no concept in East Asia that encompassed a wide and diverse range of sound-making practices. The only comparable lexicon was organized around the core Confucian ideal of yue (樂), which was inseparable from the state philosophy of liyue (禮樂). This entailed a detailed classification system that distinguished performances according to both social hierarchy and geographical origin. The refined music of the court, jeongak (正樂), was separated from the music of the common people, sogak (俗樂). Similarly, lines were drawn between repertories from Tang China (dangak, 唐樂), pan-Asian court ritual music (aak, 雅樂), and native Korean traditions (hyangak, 鄕樂). It is important to note that most of these terms, including the Japanese forms nōgaku (能楽) and hōgaku (邦楽), conceived of performance as an integrated whole in which dance was inseparable from sound.
We must therefore recognize that our modern idea of “music” in East Asia is a product of the political and cultural upheavals of the modern era. This context helps us understand the remark quoted at the beginning of this essay, in which a Japanese colonial official claimed that the Taiwanese may have songs, but no music. His statement is the product of a hybrid consciousness, born from the clash between the newly imported, translated term music and the classification systems of a previous age. Is it not precisely this clash of divergent perceptions, and the invisible fissures that emerge from it, that Donghoon Gang’s exhibition asks us to pay attention to?
trans. Abe Chung
[1]
Quoted by the musicologist Eishi Kikkawa (吉川英史) in a conversation with the prominent Japanese ethnomusicologist Hisao Tanabe. Eishi Kikkawa, “「音楽」という用語とその周辺” (“The Term ‘Music’ and Its Related Subjects“), in 日本音楽の美的研究 (Aesthetic Research on Japanese Music) (Ongaku no Tomo Sha, 1984), 41.
[2]
The Nuxalk are an Indigenous people of the British Columbia region of Canada. At the time, in the 19th century, they were known by the name given to them by Europeans, the Bella Coola.
[3]
Alexander von Humboldt, Tagebücher der Amerikanischen Reise VII a/b, Nachlasse Alexander von Humboldt, Staatbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. See pages 13–14 of the original journal, not the printout page numbers from the archive. The digitized material can be referenced in the digital archive of the Berlin State Library at the following link: https://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN779883861&PHYSID=PHYS_0001 (accessed August 29, 2025).
[4]
Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Barth, 1902[1854]), 183–4. Original emphasis.
[5]
Carl Stumpf, “Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer,” 426.
[6]
R. Murray Schafer, A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Sound-Making (Arcana: 1992), 7-8.
[7]
R Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 1977), 4.
[8]
Schafer, The Soundscape, 4.
[9]
Schafer, The Soundscape, 4.
[10]
Rafael de Oliveira, Patrícia Lima, and Alexsander Duarte,”Interview with Murray Schafer (Corfu 2011),” October 13, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4au_4Jlfo (accessed August 28, 2025). The relevant statement begins at 04:38.
[11]
R. Murray Schafer, “On the Limits of Nationalism in Canadian Music,” Tamarack Review 18 (1961). This passage by Schafer was brought to prominence by the Indigenous Canadian sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson in his book: Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 1.
[12]
Josef Škvorecký, a giant of Czech literature who spent his adolescence in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which was effectively controlled by the Nazis, recounts from memory in his novel The Bass Saxophone, a set of ten bizarre regulations issued by a gauleiter, a regional Nazi official, that bound local dance orchestras during the Czech occupation. The third item listed deals with rhythm:
“As to tempo, preference is to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues); however, the tempo must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated.”
J.J. Gould, “Josef Skvorecky on the Nazis’ Control-Freak Hatred of Jazz,” The Atlantic, January 3, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/josef-skvorecky-nazis-jazz/250837/ (accessed August 29, 2025). Author’s emphasis.
[13]
Richard Parncutt, “The emotional connotations of major versus minor tonality: One or more origins?” Musicae Scientiae 18.3(2014): 324-353; Imre Lahdelma, Tuomas Eerola, and George Athanasopoulos, “Sweetness of Harmony is in the Ear of the Beholder: Preference of Musical Chords Across Western and Northwest Pakistani Listeners,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1502.1(2021): 72-84.
[14]
A montage theory established by the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, based on the observation that when a shot of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s impassive face was juxtaposed with shots of (1) a bowl of soup, (2) a young girl in a coffin, and (3) a reclining woman, audiences interpreted his expression differently as hunger, sadness, and lust, respectively. It demonstrated that the meaning of an individual shot in a film changes according to its preceding and succeeding context, and that editing can convey specific emotions and meanings to the audience.