MDes Sound for the Moving Image School of Innovation & Technology
Hanxiao Wen
Hello, I’m Hanxiao, a postgraduate student in the Master of Design in Sound for the Moving Image. My practice moves across film, music, and experimental sound, grounded in a background of location recording, film sound production, and music mixing. These foundations allow me to approach sound with both technical precision and an openness to creative transformation.
For me, sound is never merely a supplement to the visual but a medium in its own right. It can construct immersive worlds, reveal contradictions, and invite reflection. In my work, I explore how sound shapes perception, emotion, and atmosphere。I am particularly drawn to the ways sound resonates with memory and the body, creating experiences that are felt before they are understood. In these moments, sound exists not as explanation but as resonance.
Works
The Ears Of Child
Slight discomfort and dizziness may occur during the listening process.
The Ears of Child is a journey back into listening. It seeks to recreate the auditory condition of the fetus in the womb: wrapped in fluid, where sounds lose their boundaries, directions blur, yet the body is touched with greater immediacy. The work explores how sound can slip away from the realm of language and meaning into a space that cannot be spoken, but can be intensely felt.
These sounds originate from a female voice, reintroduced into experimental setups and carried through different media, where they were captured anew by hydrophones, piezo microphones, and electromagnetic sensors. This renewed perception continues through processes of transformation and granular recomposition, as the voice gradually frees itself from the weight of language, leaving only the shimmer of texture, the surge of pressure, and the touch of envelopment. Ultimately, within the immersive field of Dolby Atmos, they converge into a womb-like soundscape — soft yet insistent, intimate yet unsettling. Here, listening no longer means understanding, but enduring the experience of being touched by sound.
This work is also informed by psychoanalytic theory, drawing on Lacan’s distinction between the symbolic and the real. It imagines a condition of listening before entry into language, where sound is not bound to signification but encountered as immediacy, resonance, and touch. In this sense, the project questions what listening means when it is detached from comprehension, proposing that sound can create spaces of intimacy and vulnerability that bypass interpretation.
