In the second phase of literature research for this project, I focused primarily on the works of sound-culture scholars such as Schafer, Feld, Stoever, and LaBelle. These texts provide interdisciplinary perspectives on how sound is perceived through cultural, spatial, political, racial, and technological lenses. Their insights have proven especially important for developing the “Visual Imagery,” “Episodic Memory,” and “Aesthetic Judgement” sections of the work.

R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape (1994) virtually established the foundation of modern soundscape studies. He emphasises that the auditory environment not only reflects the physical world but also shapes social patterns of life. His concept of the “hi-fi / lo-fi soundscape” is particularly useful in helping me understand how to construct layered spatial perception in my work: high-fidelity environments—natural, spacious, and rich in detail—provide listeners with a sense of spatial clarity, whereas low-fidelity environments—dense urban noise with overlapping frequency bands—tend to generate feelings of pressure or perceptual ambiguity. In the “Visual Imagery” movement, I deliberately chose to use minimal environmental cues rather than a full narrative soundscape. The aim was to create a suggestive acoustic space that invites listeners to generate their own internal imagery, a strategy directly inspired by Schafer’s writings.

Compared with Schafer, Feld’s (1986) work carries far greater anthropological depth. His study of Kaluli sound culture in Papua New Guinea reveals the complex ways sound and emotion interrelate in non-Western societies—where crying, bird calls, and the land itself share deeply rooted symbolic and affective connections. This made me realise that “Episodic Memory” is not merely an individual or private domain; it is often collectively shaped within culture. For this reason, I chose to incorporate certain “culturally neutral” sound sources in my piece—materials that do not point toward a specific cultural system or rely too heavily on Western memory narratives—thus allowing listeners greater freedom to import their own experiences into the work.

Stoever (2016) approaches sound studies from an entirely different angle, exposing the “racialised mechanisms” embedded in processes of listening. For instance, in U.S. history, Black voices were often labelled as “noise” or “out of control,” revealing how auditory judgement is shaped by power structures. This insight inspired a crucial idea within my project: Aesthetic Judgement is not a purely formalist experience but is frequently conditioned by cultural preference and social framing. In the final movement, therefore, I intentionally merge materials from different mechanisms and with diverse acoustic characteristics—not to achieve a singular or unified harmony, but to highlight diversity itself as an audible and meaningful aesthetic principle.

LaBelle’s (2006) analysis of the relationships among sound, the body, and space has also profoundly influenced my design. He argues that sound is often a “permeative” medium—one that passes through surfaces, materials, and bodies to form dynamic spatial relations. This perspective was particularly helpful for shaping the “Emotional Contagion” movement: breath sounds and delicate sonic textures can easily trigger embodied empathy, and this form of empathetic resonance possesses a kind of cross-cultural and cross-gender universality.