MDes Sound for the Moving Image School of Innovation & Technology
Sainan Jia
“I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey. I wake in the night, I pace like a ghost.”
Sainan Jia is a queer artist whose practice moves fluidly between sound, image, and text. Originally trained in design, with a deep affinity for abstract drawing, she later expanded her focus to the intangible terrains of sound—particularly the ways in which sonic experience can unsettle, reframe, or dissolve dominant narratives.
Graduating with an MDes in Sound for the Moving Image from The Glasgow School of Art, Jia’s work often inhabits the liminal spaces between hearing and seeing, exploring how sound can exist beyond gendered codes, linear structures, and fixed interpretations. Through an interplay of experimental composition, non-traditional notation, and spatial listening, she crafts sensory environments where sound is not simply heard, but inhabited.
[redacted] in A minor
[redacted] in A minor is an experimental jazz album that resists the grammar of endings. Through eight compositions and hand-drawn, non-traditional scores, it dismantles the gendered codes embedded in musical form—sliding between deletion and presence, silence and minimal tonality. Sound becomes a body without fixed identity, moving in loops, fragments, and dissolves; an archive of voices that refuse to resolve.
We breathe before we speak.
In [redacted] in A minor, sound drifts untethered from its assigned bodies—
pads become weather, solos fracture,
and silence is not an absence but a pulse.
Each track is a corridor where jazz forgets its rules,
where identity slips, bends, and dissolves into air.
It is not an ending; it is the echo of what was never allowed to begin.
The pieces drift between scores, drawings, and ruins.
Its loops, fractures, and absences are not accidents, but refusals—
a conscious dismantling of the soloist’s “right to speak” in jazz,
a space where no single voice claims ownership of the melody.
Influenced by Susan McClary’s critique of the V–I cadence
and the gendered hierarchy of the jazz ensemble,
the composition abandons harmonic closure and linear propulsion.
Every sound is left unfinished,
every gesture hovers between emergence and withdrawal—
mirroring how queer bodies navigate spaces
that were never designed for them.
You may read the drawing as a map of this sonic dismantling,
or as a quiet refusal to be mapped at all.
It does not instruct, it does not resolve;
it invites the listener to inhabit a field
where meaning is fluid, ownership is absent,
and every resonance is shared.
Sound-Plane Transformation Experiment: 5 Perception Faults in the Brain
This is an immersive perceptual experiment that combines abstract painting and synthetic sound, attempting to capture and visualize the vague feelings and inner resonances in our minds that are not encoded in language.
This creation started with a recurring experience – I realized that many times I was not “listening” to the world, but being “surrounded” by the sounds in my head. This is not a symptomatic perception in the sense of auditory hallucination, but a deep, lingering subjective sound that floats between language, images, and rhythm, as if the fragments of perception are constantly replayed, distorted, and recoded. These sounds do not have a clear source, nor are they always logically coherent. Sometimes they are like emotional response mechanisms, and sometimes they are like vague echoes of the body to external stimuli.
I decided to use this kind of sound as the starting point of my creation, and tried to construct a visual-auditory space about “echoes in the brain” through the linkage of sound design and abstract painting. This is not only a media experiment, but also a process of self-observation and reflection. For me, this kind of sound is not to be “restored”, but to be “reconstructed”, abstracted, textured, and finally translated into an experience that can resonate with the audience.
