With the theme of ‘Writing Sound’, the 3rd Mentorship Programme had the fortune to have Catherine Clover, a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist, and Chan Sai-lok, a local Hong Kong artist and art critic, as our artist-mentors. They brought with them a number of important dimensions with which to provide local context for the workshop.

On 3 March 2018, we held our first meeting with eight local artist-mentees from various backgrounds, ranging from a musician, a sound designer, visual artist, theatre director, researcher, and journalist. Catherine’s introduction to her artistic creations illustrated some general ideas about writing sound and how this could be converted into artworks.

“As our mentees are all bilingual speakers of Cantonese and English, I could learn about and from their experiences of working with two or more languages, such as their considerations when navigating between the different languages and their unique relations with each language,” said Catherine.

Catherine also talked about Rambling, her performance in Hong Kong in late 2017. Rambling focuses on the voicing and speaking across different species, especially the vocal connections between humans and birds. This performance inspired the artist-mentors and -mentees to start a discussion on bi- or tri-lingualism, based on their own backgrounds. Catherine shared her experience of speaking English and French as a British-native before she moved to Australia. She observed that Australians mostly speak English, Italian, or Greek, and Hong Kongers speak Cantonese, English, and Mandarin. Besides these dominant languages in society, both places have long been cradles of various other languages and dialects. Hong Kong, for instance, is home to a vast variety of local dialects, and Australia has an impressive range of indigenous languages, among which over 300 are now extinct.

“‘Sound’ is a kind of physical presence that does not carry ‘meaning’ in itself; on the other hand, ‘writing’ has a semiotic presence that exists to represent something else. ‘Listening’ is the reception of acoustic waves, but our brains are too accustomed to sort words by sounds and neglect the meaning and the act of listening itself,” says Donald Chung.

We live in an environment with a mix of sounds, while language has been continually evolving according to social and cultural changes since the beginning of time. To a certain extent language is not always reliable, despite its authority and authenticity. Catherine therefore encouraged the artist-mentees to pay and call for more attention to the sonic properties of language and words without being bound by the usual linguistic barriers such as spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. The process of writing sounds should embrace the dysfunction or deconstruction of linguistics.

The first workshop concluded with an evening soundwalk along the river, under the Ap Lei Chau Bridge. The trail provided a mix of the urban and the natural, with blocks of industrial buildings on one side and planned green space on the other. The sound walk was not only a listening exercise focusing on paying attention, but also a creative one. We interpreted our surroundings by switching between languages and ways of communication, translated the sounds we heard into homophones, and avoided judging the meanings of sounds based on our common comprehension. In our initial attempts to accurately record sounds with words, we realised how insufficient our writing ability was. Apart from the lack of a suitable Chinese vocabulary, our documentation was a double simplification – we might have already forgotten half of the sounds as we struggled to write them down, leaving us with only a general impression. During the listening process, sometimes we even mixed up some sounds. For instance, how much did the “gib-gib” squeak of the squash players’ sneakers sound like bird calls, or was it that the birds were mimicking the squash players?

Throughout the Mentorship Programme, every artist-mentee kept a sound journal to jot down their creative responses. This included writing four texts on sound and drawing four sound maps – two in Hong Kong and two in Kuala Lumpur. After their glimpse into the ideas of writing sound on the first day of the workshop, the artist-mentees started to develop their own visuals, their languages, and strategies to solve this conundrum in the following workshops.

第三屆拜師學藝以探索「書寫聲音」為題。是屆除了駐澳洲墨爾本的跨媒介藝術家Catherine Clover外，我們還邀請了香港本地藝術家及藝評人陳世樂一同擔任藝術家導師，藉此為工作坊添上另一層論述，讓討論更貼近本地的文化語境。

2018年3月3日，我們與八位本地藝術家首次會面，他們來自不同背景，有音樂人、聲音設計師、視覺藝術家、劇場導演、研究員及記者等。Catherine先介紹她個人的藝術創作，並借作品為例講述關於書寫聲音的概念，或是它能被轉化成怎樣的作品。

「藝術家學員都能以廣東話及英語作雙語溝通，因此我可從他們身上了解有關運用兩種或多種語言的體驗，例如他們遊走於不同語言時的考量，以及他們跟每一種語言所產生的關係。」Catherine Clover 說。

Catherine分享了她2017年底於香港演出的《Rambling》，作品主要探討物種之間的發聲和語言，尤其是人與雀鳥間的聲音聯繫，這作品隨即引起藝術家導師和學員互相討論各自的雙語或三語背景。Catherine分享英國人主要說英語和法語，而當她移居澳洲後，觀察到澳洲人主要說英語﹑意大利語和希臘語；而身處香港的我們大多說廣東話﹑英語和國語。除了這幾種社會上慣用的語言外，兩個地方本身的歷史都分別孕育了不同的語言或方言，如香港存著不同的本土方言而澳洲則有著多樣的原住民語言等，而當中有三百多種的原住民語言現已失傳。

「『聲音』是一種物理性的存在，它本身不帶含意義；但『文字』則是一種符號，

它的存在是為了代表另一回事。『聆聽』本身只是對於聲波的接收，但我們的大腦卻太習慣以文字來把聲音分類，然後便輕視了聆聽本身的意義，草率聆聽。」鍾肇熙說。

我們生活的環境由不同聲音所組成，當中包括我們所聽到或使用的語言。這些語言本身隨著社會和文化的轉變也一直演變著。某程度上，儘管語言本身有著一定的權威性、真確性，它或可以是不可靠的。Catherine鼓勵藝術家學員在使用語言或文字來書寫聲音時，多加留意或意識語言及文字的聲音特性，而非一如我們日常使用語言或文字時，總被拼寫﹑文法和句子結構等障礙所限制。在書寫聲音這過程中，我們應該大膽擁抱語言的失效或瓦解。

首日的工作坊以傍晚的聲音漫步作結，我們沿鴨脷洲大橋下的河步行，那是一條結合城市與自然特色的路徑——河的一邊是幢幢工業大廈，另一邊則是被規劃的一片綠化空間。這次的聲音漫步除了是一個有關專注的聆聽練習，也是一個創作練習，我們透過轉換語言或表達方式來譯寫週遭，將聽到的聲音翻譯成同音字的同時，我們也盡量避免像日常理解聲音般對它的意義作出判斷。最初，對於要準確地以文字記錄聲音，我們卻發現書寫的能力是那麼的不充足，不單是缺乏合用的中文詞彙，當中也存著雙重的簡化——當我們努力尋找一種書寫表達之時，可能已把本來的聲音忘了一半，只剩下大概印象。在聆聽過程中，有時我們甚或會被一些聲音混淆，例如我們會想：壁球手的球鞋於移動中所發出的「吱吱」聲跟雀鳥的聲音是何等相似，還是雀鳥正在模仿著壁球手呢?

在整個「拜師學藝」期間，每位藝術家學員都擁有一本聲音日誌，在工作坊的過程中記下不同的創作回應，包括四篇關於聲音的書寫和創作四幅回應聲音的圖像表達，香港和吉隆坡各兩篇。於第一天接觸書寫聲音的概念以及參與後來的不同練習後，藝術家學員都發展出各人獨有的一套視覺、語言或策略，用以解開接下來有關書寫聲音的謎團。

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