陈芊贝
Sound artist · Researcher · Creative producer
I’m a sound artist, researcher and creative producer based in the UK. Working with spatial audio, field recording and oral testimony, I explore cultural memory, displacement and belonging. My practice asks how sound can bring us closer to other people’s experiences while leaving room for uncertainty and conflicting memories.
I am Executive Producer of INJUSTICES 1946 and an Associate Producer and Sound Designer on a BBC Radio 4 production exploring Cantonese opera.
I graduated from UCL with Distinction, following undergraduate study at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts. My undergraduate thesis scored 96/100, first in my major. I received academic scholarships in three consecutive years (2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24), awarded within the top 3% of the department by annual examination ranking. My Ambisonic adaptation of Haitang Hua received the only Outstanding Graduation Project award in my graduating major.
Ambisonic sound works · Headphone editions
Current project
A cultural research and storytelling project beginning with the forced repatriation of Liverpool’s Chinese merchant seamen and its continuing impact on their descendants. I lead work across research, audio production and digital storytelling, connecting family testimony with public engagement.
Visit the project website01Documentary · Cultural memory
海未曾言说
Descendant testimony and spatial composition explore the continuing effects of Liverpool’s Chinese seamen repatriations.
Listen to the workAudio preview pending
Contains intense sonic passages. Begin at a comfortable low volume.
Centred on the first-person accounts of Yvonne Foley and Joe Phillips, this work considers paternal absence, racial discrimination and disrupted cultural inheritance among descendants of Liverpool’s repatriated Chinese merchant seamen.
Testimonial voices remain comparatively stable and foregrounded. Environmental recordings and synthetic materials carry greater movement and transformation, creating relationships between contemporary places, memory and cultural distance. This is a constructed sonic geography rather than a claim to recover the sound of a historical event.
How can listening bear witness while leaving absence unresolved?
The accompanying research asks what remains of authorial power when an omniscient narrator is removed. Selection, sequencing and spatial organisation still shape the encounter. Listener responses also revealed a threshold at which physical intensity could distract from testimony, making restraint and calibration central to the composition.
A recurring Morse fragment encodes “where is my father”. An interactive decoding puzzle was deliberately rejected because its promise of a solution conflicted with the work’s unresolved absence.
Research, interviews, composition and spatial sound: Qianbei Chen. Testimony: Yvonne Foley and Joe Phillips.
Sound format: third-order, 16-channel Ambisonic master; binaural rendering for headphones.
02Ethnography · Musical belonging
流动中的归属
A connected journey from the intimacy of joining an ensemble to the wider circulation of Chinese musical practice in London.
Two complementary parts of one journey. Part II is the binaural edition of the loudspeaker composition.
Developed through research with the SOAS Chinese Music Ensemble, this project centres diasporic and cross-cultural members whose relationships develop through making music together. Two complementary spatial works move from personal participation to wider cultural circulation.
The headphone work turns inward. Drawing on legitimate peripheral participation, it explores changing perceptual intimacy through proximity, dryness, spectral clarity and a constrained soundfield. The realised trajectory centres the drummer’s experience, while the evaluation recognises the other perspectives that remain underdeveloped.
How does taking part become belonging, and how does a shared practice travel?
The loudspeaker work opens outward. Phrases recorded across different sites, audience responses and multilingual contributions of “together” explore diffusion as accumulation and transformation through encounter. The online presentation uses a binaural rendering of this loudspeaker composition.
A coherent theoretical structure does not automatically become audible. Meaning had to be tested through listening to timbre, distance, density and rhythm. A collective recording also does not, by itself, reveal the social relationships within a group.
Research, field recording, composition and spatial sound: Qianbei Chen. Developed with recordings and contributions from the SOAS Chinese Music Ensemble.
Sound format: third-order, 16-channel Ambisonic master; binaural rendering for headphones.
03Oral history · Urban memory
家的回声
Open City Documentary Festival · 2026 Audio Student Showcase
An exploration of hardship, intimacy and the contradictory memories of Kowloon Walled City.
Echoes of Home: The Dualities of Kowloon Walled City brings the enclave’s difficult living conditions into conversation with memories of communal warmth. It asks how listening can complicate the sensational images through which the Walled City is often known.
Authorised testimony from former resident Albert Ng and urban designer Suenn Ho anchors the work. Newly recorded environments, including analogous locations in London, form an artistic construction around their accounts. These recordings are not archival recordings of the demolished Walled City.
What makes a place remembered as difficult to live in also remembered as home?
Church bells, aircraft, domestic sounds and recurring musical fragments bring different scales of memory into proximity. Layered reverberation explores density and separation; spiritual calm interrupted by aircraft gives spatial form to the contradictions of everyday life.
The project holds hardship and attachment together, making room for residents’ emotional knowledge without reducing a place to either deprivation or nostalgia.
Research, field recording and spatial composition: Qianbei Chen. Testimonial contributors: Albert Ng and Suenn Ho.
Sound format: third-order, 16-channel Ambisonic master; binaural rendering for headphones.
04Historical interpretation · Spatial narrative
先见与孤声
A spatial narrative of intellectual encounter, political resistance and the isolation of seeing differently.
Centred on the late-Qing diplomat and thinker Guo Songtao, this work considers the loneliness of intellectual departure. His encounter with Britain becomes a way to ask what happens when observation unsettles the political and cultural assumptions of one’s own world.
Four scenes move from Yuelu Academy to a London railway station and a British steel mill, then return to Changsha. Rain provides continuity while the changing scale of the soundfield moves between constraint, industrial intensity and isolation.
What does it mean to recognise change before the world around you is ready to hear it?
Informed by historical research and Guo’s travel writing, the composition uses contemporary recordings and designed sound as interpretive materials. It offers an artistic encounter with ideological conflict, without claiming access to the exact sounds or private thoughts of a historical life.
The work treats foresight as a social predicament: perceiving new possibilities can deepen the distance between an individual and the community to which they return.
Research, narrative sound design and Ambisonic composition: Qianbei Chen.
Original project title: Guo Songtao (1818–1891): A Sonic Journey Through China’s Colonial Modernity.
Sound format: third-order, 16-channel Ambisonic master; binaural rendering for headphones.
05Chinese opera · Virtual acoustics
海棠入境
Outstanding Graduation Project · sole award in the graduating major
An undergraduate graduation work exploring 《海棠花》 through Ambisonic mixing and spatial sound design.
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This undergraduate graduation project adapts the Peking opera excerpt 《海棠花》 (Haitang Hua) through Ambisonic mixing and spatial sound design. Its central inquiry is how opera’s capacity to suggest expansive worlds within a limited stage can be developed through sound.
The project draws on published acoustic measurements of a traditional theatre, together with parameter estimation and iterative listening. SPAT Revolution and MATLAB supported the construction and refinement of a virtual acoustic environment.
How might the imagined space of opera unfold through listening?
Voices and instrumental layers are positioned according to their narrative and musical roles. Selected movement develops dialogue and emotional progression, while more sustained textures retain spatial continuity. Spatial extension remains attentive to the musical phrasing and suggestive aesthetics of the source material.
The contribution lies in the spatial interpretation and mixing of existing musical material. The original excerpt remains explicitly credited as the foundation of the work.
Ambisonic mixing and spatial sound design: Qianbei Chen. Source: the Peking opera excerpt 《海棠花》. Undergraduate graduation project, National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts.
Sound format: third-order, 16-channel Ambisonic master; binaural rendering for headphones.
Artist statement
My practice brings together spatial composition, field recording, oral testimony and research. Across Chinese musical communities, remembered urban spaces and histories of displacement, I investigate how proximity, distance, repetition and silence shape our relationship to people and places.
I am interested in the choices that make an encounter possible. Editing a voice, reconstructing an environment or intensifying a sound can shape what a listener understands and feels. My recent work asks how these decisions can remain accountable to the people whose experiences enter an artwork, while allowing uncertainty and conflicting memories to remain.
Working between artistic practice and anthropology, I treat listening as an inquiry into how experience is shared, interpreted and transformed.
I approach composition as a form of enquiry. Across these works, I ask how listening represents another person’s experience, how participation creates belonging, and how remembered places become audible. Interviews, participant review and critical listening help me examine those creative choices.
My field-recording practice uses first- and second-order Reynolds Ambisonic microphones. I combine these recordings with stereo material encoded into a third-order, 16-channel Ambisonic soundfield, then render the master binaurally for headphone listening. Individual source material and creative contributions are credited in the notes for each work.
For sound design, audio documentary and artistic research collaborations.
Qianbei Chen
声音艺术家 · 研究者 · 创意制作人
我是一位现居英国的声音艺术家、研究者与创意制作人。我的创作结合空间音频、田野录音与口述访谈，关注文化记忆、迁徙与归属。我希望通过声音，让听众接近他人的生活经验，也为矛盾、迟疑与未获回应的记忆留下空间。
目前，我担任 INJUSTICES 1946 执行制作人，并以联合制作人（Associate Producer）与声音设计师身份参与一项关于粤剧的 BBC Radio 4 节目制作。
我本科毕业于中国戏曲学院，硕士毕业于伦敦大学学院（UCL），获 Distinction。本科毕业论文以 96/100 位列专业第一；连续三个学年（2021/22、2022/23、2023/24）获得学业奖学金，评选范围为按学年考试成绩排名的全系前 3%。以京剧《海棠花》为基础的 Ambisonic 毕业作品，获当届全专业唯一“优秀毕业设计”。
Ambisonic 声音作品 · 耳机聆听版
当前项目
以利物浦华人商船海员遭强制遣返的历史为起点，关注这段历史对后代生活、身份与记忆的持续影响。我负责研究、声音制作与数字叙事，让后代的亲身讲述进入更广泛的公共讨论。
访问项目网站01音频纪录 · 文化记忆
What the Sea Refused to Tell
从利物浦华人海员后代的讲述出发，倾听强制遣返如何持续影响家庭、身份与代际记忆。
聆听作品试听暂未开放
作品包含较强烈的声音段落，建议从舒适的较低音量开始。
作品以 Yvonne Foley 与 Joe Phillips 的第一人称讲述为核心，追溯利物浦华人商船海员遭强制遣返后，后代所经历的父亲缺席、种族歧视与文化传承断裂。历史事件由此进入家庭与个人生活的尺度，成为至今仍在发生的情感经验。
在声音结构中，讲述者的人声保持清晰、相对稳定的位置，环境录音与合成声音则承担空间移动和情绪变化。不同地方的当代录音被重新组织，让记忆、距离与文化认同在同一声场中相遇。作品中的空间，是对这些关系的艺术表达。
当历史留下的空缺无法填补，声音如何成为见证？
配套研究进一步追问：移除全知旁白之后，创作者的权力去了哪里？选择哪段讲述、如何安排次序、让声音从何处出现，仍在塑造听众的理解。听众反馈也促使我反复调整声音强度，为证言保留足够的清晰度与空间。
作品中反复出现的摩斯电码传递着“我的父亲在哪里”。我最终放弃了把它设计成互动解谜：一个可以被解出的答案，无法回应家庭生活中始终未被填补的缺席。
研究、访谈、声音创作与空间设计：陈芊贝。口述贡献：Yvonne Foley、Joe Phillips。
声音格式：三阶、16 通道 Ambisonic 母版，渲染为双耳音频供耳机聆听。
02民族志 · 音乐与归属
Belonging in Motion
两部作品共同构成一段旅程：从加入合奏的个人体验，走向中国音乐在伦敦不同社群与场所间的流动。
两部分共同构成一段完整旅程；第二部分为扬声器作品的双耳渲染版。
这项研究围绕 SOAS 中国音乐社团展开，关注不同文化背景的成员如何通过共同演奏建立关系。两部作品分别从个体参与和文化传播出发，构成同一段由内向外的声音旅程。
第一部分聚焦参与者逐渐进入合奏的过程。借助“合法的边缘性参与”这一概念，我通过声音的远近、混响、清晰度与声场范围，表现从旁观到投入的感受变化。其中，鼓手的体验构成了最完整的叙事线索。
人如何在共同演奏中获得归属？音乐又如何随着人与地方的相遇，延续并改变？
第二部分将视野扩展至音乐在不同场所间的传播。跨场所录制的乐句、观众回应，以及不同语言中的“一起”，交织出音乐在相遇中被分享、积累和转化的过程。这部分最初面向扬声器声场创作，网页呈现其双耳渲染版本，适合使用耳机聆听。
理论上的连贯，并不必然成为听觉上的清晰。反思与试听让我意识到，音色、距离、密度和节奏需要真正帮助听众感知变化；而一段热闹的集体录音，也未必能呈现其中每个人的位置与关系。
研究、田野录音、声音创作与空间设计：陈芊贝。录音及参与者讲述来自 SOAS 中国音乐社团。
声音格式：三阶、16 通道 Ambisonic 母版，渲染为双耳音频供耳机聆听。
03口述历史 · 城市记忆
Echoes of Home
入选 2026 伦敦 Open City Documentary Festival 学生声音作品展映
在九龙寨城关于艰难、亲密与眷恋的记忆之间，重新聆听“家”的含义。
《Echoes of Home: The Dualities of Kowloon Walled City》将九龙寨城艰难的生活条件与居民对邻里温情的回忆并置。作品希望让那些日常、细微而矛盾的经验被听见，为这片常被奇观化的城市空间带来更贴近人的理解。
寨城前居民 Albert Ng 与城市设计师 Suenn Ho 的授权讲述，构成作品的叙事基础。我以新录制的环境声围绕这些回忆进行创作，其中也包括伦敦的替代场所。由此形成的声音空间，是对记忆的诠释，而非寨城历史录音的复原。
一个生活艰难的地方，为什么仍会被人深深怀念为家？
教堂钟声、飞机轰鸣、日常生活声与反复出现的音乐片段，让私密经验与城市尺度相互交叠。层叠混响描绘密集空间中的接近与隔绝，安宁被噪声打断的瞬间，则保留了日常生活本身的矛盾。
艰难的生活与对家的依恋可以同时存在。我希望作品为居民的情感经验留下位置，让寨城的记忆保有超出苦难或怀旧的复杂面貌。
研究、田野录音与空间声音创作：陈芊贝。口述贡献：Albert Ng、Suenn Ho。
声音格式：三阶、16 通道 Ambisonic 母版，渲染为双耳音频供耳机聆听。
04历史诠释 · 空间叙事
The Solitude of Foresight
以郭嵩焘的出使与归来为线索，探索跨文化相遇、思想转变，以及先见者与时代之间的距离。
作品以晚清外交家、思想家郭嵩焘为中心，关注“看见世界”所带来的思想震动与个人处境。“晚清看世界第一人”这一评价背后，是观察外部世界之后，重新审视自身社会，并为此承受质疑与孤立的经历。
声音叙事从岳麓书院出发，经过伦敦火车站与英国钢铁厂，最终回到长沙。雨声贯穿四个场景，声场则由拘束逐渐扩张，再转向孤寂。空间尺度的变化，让思想上的震动与个体的疏离成为可以被感知的经验。
当一个人比他的时代更早看见变化，他将如何面对随之而来的孤独？
创作参考历史研究及郭嵩焘的行旅文字，以当代录音和声音设计展开艺术诠释。我关注的，是他在不同知识与价值体系之间所经历的张力，以及这种张力如何改变一个人与故土的关系。
先见不只是一种认知能力，也可能是一种艰难的社会处境。看见新的可能，有时意味着与自己所归属的共同体渐行渐远。
研究、声音叙事设计与 Ambisonic 创作：陈芊贝。
原项目题名：Guo Songtao (1818–1891): A Sonic Journey Through China’s Colonial Modernity。
声音格式：三阶、16 通道 Ambisonic 母版，渲染为双耳音频供耳机聆听。
05中国戏曲 · 虚拟声学
Begonia: A Stage Beyond Sight
优秀毕业设计 · 当届全专业唯一
改编自京剧片段《海棠花》，以 Ambisonic 混音和空间声音设计，探索戏曲写意空间的听觉表达。
音频暂时无法载入，可通过原始 WAV 链接聆听，或刷新页面重试。
这件本科毕业作品以京剧片段《海棠花》为基础，进行 Ambisonic 混音与空间声音设计。创作从戏曲的写意美学出发，探索有限舞台如何通过声音展开更广阔的场景与情感空间。
项目参考传统戏楼的声学测量资料，结合参数估算与反复试听，运用 SPAT Revolution 和 MATLAB 建构并调整虚拟声学环境，让空间处理回应戏曲表演本身的节奏与气韵。
戏曲在有限舞台上展开的想象，如何在声音空间中延伸？
人声与器乐声部依据各自的叙事、音乐功能进行空间布局。适度的移动轨迹呼应角色对话与情绪变化，持续性的声音层次则维系声场的连贯。在扩展听觉空间的同时，创作始终关注原作的乐句与写意表达。
这件作品的核心，是通过空间诠释与混音，让已有的戏曲材料产生新的聆听经验。京剧片段《海棠花》始终是作品明确署名的创作基础。
Ambisonic 混音与空间声音设计：陈芊贝。改编基础：京剧片段《海棠花》。中国戏曲学院本科毕业作品。
声音格式：三阶、16 通道 Ambisonic 母版，渲染为双耳音频供耳机聆听。
艺术陈述
我的创作结合空间声音、田野录音、口述访谈与艺术研究。从跨文化音乐社群，到消失的城市空间与离散家庭的记忆，我关注声音如何让那些难以言说、尚未被充分记录的经验进入公共视野。距离、方位、重复与沉默，既是创作材料，也影响着我们理解他人、感知历史的方式。
我尤其关心聆听背后的选择与责任。谁的声音被保留，怎样的环境被重建，何时靠近、何时退后，都在影响听众的理解。我希望作品能够容纳矛盾、迟疑和未获回应的问题，让讲述者的经验保有自身的复杂性。
在声音艺术与人类学之间，我将创作视为一种持续的研究：通过聆听建立关系，也不断检视自己如何呈现他人的生活。
我将声音创作视为一种研究方法：声音如何呈现他人的经验？归属如何在共同参与中形成？记忆中的地方又如何被重新听见？访谈、参与者审阅与反复试听，帮助我不断检视这些创作选择。
田野录音采用 Reynolds 一阶与二阶 Ambisonic 麦克风。后期将这些录音与经过空间编码的立体声素材结合，在三阶、16 通道 Ambisonic 格式中完成创作与混音，最后渲染为双耳音频，适配耳机聆听。各作品的素材来源与创作分工，均在作品说明中注明。
欢迎就声音设计、音频纪录与艺术研究展开交流与合作。
