We’ve: Community. A Soundscape Audio Essay

“We’ve: Community” is a study for a larger project about transnational, transracial, translinguistic, Korean adoptees. I’m calling this a “soundscape audio essay ¹ ” because it essays (tries) to make audible ideas about Korean adoptee personhood, identity, genealogy, and nationality through various archival materials including field recordings, interviews and testimonies, and original electronic music. Since 1953, nearly 200,000 Korean children have been adopted into American and European homes. As a Korean adoptee raised in rural New Jersey on a dairy farm, I grew up with an intimate understanding of difference along with a pervasive sense of “not-belonging,” that I experienced within my own body and environment. This essay asks what makes a Korean person “Korean?” Is it their phenotype? Their culture? Their language? How fundamental is an understanding of where you come from, in forming who you are, and rooting yourself in a sense of identity? How do Korean immigrants in the US come to represent the range of attitudes that Americans hold towards Asians in general, but specifically those in which they “saved” and simultaneously fought as the “enemy” during the Korean and Vietnam Wars?

As T.W. Adorno notes, in “The Essay as Form,” an essay is speculative and follows its author’s logical and illogical ideas wherever they may flow. It situates itself between scholarship and art, affording artists an intellectual project, without requiring the definitive proof that scholars are beholden to. ² An essay is an exercise in incomplete attempts, situated and partial knowledge, heterogeneous and speculative possibilities. It asks more questions than it could possibly answer. A soundscape audio essay serves artistic research and critical experiments in sound by producing speculative, sensory knowledge of erased histories and voices. As a soundscape, this work attempts to create spaces and places using sound. These are both real in that they come from field recordings sourced from freesound.org ³ , but also speculative, in that these places, where these sounds meet, do not exist. The space created through these materials is the auditory experience itself. In this way, the composition of this soundscape essay is also a metaphor for the adoptee’s conception of the places and spaces they inhabit, from both the imagined and lived experiences.

The primary source materials for this subject came from several intimate conversations with Providence-based poet, writer, and educator Mary-Kim Arnold. Arnold. We were both part of the second generation of Korean adoptees brought to the United States following the end of the Korean War. Starting in March of 2021 ⁴ , Mary-Kim and I would speak weekly via Zoom. Our conversations were completely open, natural, and unforced, without any agenda that wasn’t easily abandoned in the flow of the moment. We focused on the sounds of our voices and the sharing of stories, experiences, and histories together. Each conversation unfolded like a song.

We’ve: Community is an attempt to develop an interdisciplinary, sonic/language form that has the capacity to hold the contradictions and challenges of stories about subjectivity, identity, and race. The work sets out to avoid romanticizing the loss and sadness of adoptee stories while also recognizing and addressing this loss by testing the limits of the soundscape essay to do both. It was also important to find ways to communicate how enjoyable our conversations were - our obvious connection and resonance and growing kinship. I sounded this work with theorists, Salome Voegelin and Saidiya Hartman to explore how their ideas of the archive and memory, accessed through sound, might activate and intervene into, Mary-Kim and my archival memories. Finally, I wanted to think, just for a moment about the “fugue” – which is both the musical form popularized by Bach, but also the psychological term describing “a flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality ⁵ .” I think of my project with Mary-Kim as alluding to both of those definitions. In a fugue, when the first voice has completed the aural subject, and the second voice is playing the answer, the first voice usually continues by playing a new theme called the ‘countersubject’. The countersubject usually contrasts with the subject/answer phrase shape. The fugue is a conversation of difference together. Counter-subject, counterpoint. Two independent lines in dialogue.

Bibliography and Multimedia Sources

Arnold, Mary-Kim. “Reading from Litany for the Long Moment.” Virtual Poetry Reading on Zoom, at the University of Texas at El Paso, April 27, 2021.
“Great Big Story, Pansori: South Korea’s Authentic Musical Storytelling.” Posted on August 21, 2017 by Great Big Story. YouTube, 4 min. 32 sec. https://www.y outube.com/watch?v=8Kt7YdXsWzg.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1 .
“Korean War Orphans Adopted By American Families 1956 - Historic Stock Footage.” Posted November 1, 2016, by Buyout Footage Historic Film Archive. YouTube. YouTube, 43 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYJMH6E2Uac .
“Newsreel: Report on Korea – 1953.” Posted August 12, 2015 by Weirdo Video. YouTube, 3 min. 12 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxhgH4Cndr8 .
“SAVE THE CHILDREN FUND - KOREAN WAR ORPHANS - 1950’S – SOUND.“ Posted July 21, 2015 by British Movietone. YouTube, 2 min. 40 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k00rPLOJohc .
The Association, “Cherish.” Written by Terry Kirkman and produced by Curt Boettcher. Track 7 on And Then… Along Comes the Association. Valiant, Warner Brothers. 1966. Spotify app.
Voegelin, Salomé. “The Place My Listening Makes.” Sounds and Sound Technology as Spatial Parameters Seminar at ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland, June 2, 2011. (Unpublished.)

This soundscape audio essay uses the following sounds from freesound.org

“0102 Restroom_music.wav” by bmoreno ( https://freesound.org/people/bmoreno/sounds/147923/ ) Licensed under CCBY 4.0.
“0044 Bell_and_motorbike” by bmoreno ( https://freesound.org/people/bmoreno/sounds/146273/ ) Licensed under CCBY 4.0.
“frogsinrice.mp3” by omjn ( https://freesound.org/people/omjn/sounds/24139/ ) Licensed under CC BY 3.0.
“061224-chongnyangnyi-market2.wav” by sazman, ( https://freesound.org/people/sazman/sounds/28251 ). Licensed under CCBY 4.0.
”korea_morgenansprache.flac” by nikitralala, ( https://freesound.org/people/nikitralala/sounds/239938/ ) is licensed under CC0 1.0.

All other sounds

Original music and field recordings by Bonnie Jones, recorded Zoom interviews with Bonnie Jones and Mary-Kim Arnold.

Footnotes

1. The term “soundscape audio essay” is an extension of what Sanne Krogh and Kristine Samson, in an exciting, recent emergence in scholarly research output, call the “audio paper” as detailed in their 2016 manifesto “Audio Papers.” Groth, Sanne Krogh, and Kristine Samson. “Audio Papers.” Seismograf, no. 16 (August 30, 2016): 1. https://doi.org/10.48233/seismograf1601 . Similarly, audio essay was the subject of philosophy press, Urbanomic’s “Sonic Faction” event, “Audio essay as medium and method,” held in 2022 at at Iklectik, London, UK. The press has recently published essays related to this event. Barton, Justin, Steve Goodman, and Maya B. Kronic, eds. Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method. Urbanomic, 2024. ↩
2. Adorno, Theodor W., Bob Hullot-Kentor, and Frederic Will. “The essay as form.” New german critique 32 (1984): 151-171. ↩
3. I purposely chose field recording that I did not take myself, with the intention of exploring this notion of “another’s listening” that might happen when someone chooses what they want to record within an environment. ↩
4. For context, this soundscape essay was conceived and produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, the United States saw a significant rise in hate-crimes against Asian Americans compounded by the Atlanta, Georgia Spa Shootings, where a gunman targeted Asian beauticians and sex workers at salons and massage parlors. ↩
5. “Fugue, n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary.” Accessed February 17, 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/fugue_n . ↩