MDes Sound for the Moving Image School of Innovation & Technology
Qiming Xiao
Qiming Xiao is an artist working across sound, moving image, and narrative forms. With a background in drama and film, she developed her foundation in screenwriting and filmmaking before expanding her practice into sonic arts. This shift led her to pursue an MDes in Sound for the Moving Image at the Glasgow School of Art, where she deepened her interest in the emotional and conceptual role of sound in storytelling.
Her work investigates how sound and image shape perception, memory, and atmosphere. Blending experimental composition, field recording, and audiovisual collage, she explores the relationship between sensory experience and cultural context. Whether in installation, digital media, or moving image, her practice seeks to challenge linear narratives and invite deeper ways of listening and seeing.
Urban Echoes in the Gully of Memory
This project explores how urban noise can serve as a form of memory-based cultural narrative. Using field recordings collected in Glasgow and various Chinese cities, I created a digital vinyl record comprising two musical pieces. When these sounds, typically perceived as background noise, are reimagined as meaningful “urban notes,” they generate random visual expressions of their interconnectedness, reflecting the distinct textures, atmosphere, and identities of different cities across nations.
The project is ultimately presented through an interactive website, inviting listeners to navigate between two soundscapes with distinctly different rhythms and spatial sensations. These are not intended to create contrast but rather to emphasize how memory, place, and emotion are shaped by the act of listening, and how sound transcend time and space to preserve a sense of personal belonging.
You can view the full version of the final output of this project on this personal website:
https://www.wisite.co.uk/
Encoding the Self
In an age where identities are increasingly mediated, quantified, and fragmented by technology, the line between human and machine has become extremely blurred. Once considered a stable organic form, the body is now a porous site of interaction, constantly interacting with screens, sensors, algorithms, and data systems. This project explores the boundaries between biology and code, emotion and automation, existence and simulation.
Entitled “Encoding the Self”, the work consists of three experimental short films, each shot and produced using stop-motion animation and ultimately presented on a monitor screen, exploring themes such as digital embodiment, glitch aesthetics, cybernetic identity, and the posthuman condition.
Crucially, this journal also explores key learning outcomes, including the application of audiovisual theory, critical self-assessment of my creative output, and the integration of multisensory methods to explore meaning beyond text. The following sections will outline the inspiration, execution, challenges, and learnings of this project, all based on the emotional and aesthetic impact of sensory experience.
