Taroko: A Lullaby of Coastal

This work is about the relationship between people and nature.

A lullaby is a mother’s song to her child. It is gentle and warm. The child rests in her arms, rocked slowly back and forth, until the body and mind grow quiet and fall asleep. In this piece, the mother gradually becomes nature, and perhaps even something divine. She is hidden in the wind, sea, mountains, and stars. Though unseen, her presence can be felt as both freedom and a quiet embrace.

The music begins with the coastal wind at dawn. The wind sings through the tall cliffs of Taroko, its echoes traveling through the canyon, before moving toward the sea. Sunlight spreads across the water, warm and peaceful. The wind slowly enters the heart of the waves, and the sea grows stronger. At sunset, waves rise and break into spray. They become more than a picture of nature: they carry the overwhelming feeling I experience when confronted with the beauty of the evening sky.

At the height of the waves, I feel something like an encounter with the divine—a powerful yet reassuring force that shakes me from within, almost beyond what I can bear. Yet the wind does not leave the child there. It gradually calms and rocks the child back toward stillness. Beneath a sky full of stars, the remaining waves continue to rise and fall, carrying the listener gently into sleep.

This is not only a piece about wind and sea, but also a lullaby about being held by nature.

Taroko is one of Taiwan’s most iconic landscapes and part of my homeland. For me, it is more than a magnificent gorge; it is a place of familiarity and belonging, like a mother. The “mother” in this work may be nature itself, Taroko, or something greater hidden within them—a presence that gives us both freedom and shelter.

The music focuses on the “weight of wind“ and the “volume of the sea”. Though wind has no physical shape, its sound is formed into thick, flowing masses, like a mother’s hands wrapping around her child—the listener. The waves are given physical weight through spatial sound, moving around the listener, coming closer, pulling away, rising, and falling.

All of the wave sounds are digitally created. Using ChucK, white noise and algorithms build an imagined sea, allowing the sounds of nature to become part of a dialogue between the natural world and human imagination.

The beauty of Taroko was once interrupted by landslides caused by the 2024 earthquake, temporarily keeping people from entering the landscape. In a twenty-first century of melting glaciers, extreme weather, and a changing earth, perhaps we can pause and ask: “if nature is the mother in this lullaby, how might we respond to her care?”