ICMC BOSTON 2025
Online Listening Room
Curiosity, Play, Innovation - A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Creativity in Music, Science, and Technology
June 8-14, 2025
ICMC BOSTON 2025: Online Listening Room #5
ID#: 771
I Saw a Butterfly Nestled in a Bell (2024) ; 5:00
by Yifeng Yuan
University of California, Santa Barbara
I Saw a Butterfly Nestled in a Bell is a two-channel fixed-media acousmatic composition that explores the interplay between environmental recording, sonic transformation, and extended auditory imagination. The work was conceptually sparked by the experience of striking a large Buddhist temple bell and the speculative question: “Could there be creatures residing inside the bell, and did I just wake them up by ringing it?” This metaphor of awakening latent sonic entities became the structural and textural impetus for the piece. The source material consists primarily of site-specific field recordings and object-based sounds. The audio was deconstructed and reassembled through granulation, spectral processing, dynamic shaping, and other computer-based techniques. These operations allowed for the expansion of the recordings’ internal microstructures into immersive and evolving timbral fields.
Yin-Chi Chang
Yifeng Yvonne Yuan converts the frequency of herself losing socks into the frequency of pitches; she weighs raindrops to decide the weight of her noteheads. She is a composer, sound artist, and performer born and raised in China and based in Southern California. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Music Composition and an M.S. in Media Arts and Technology at UC Santa Barbara. Yvonne draws inspiration from the materiality of sound and the poetry of language. Text, sound, and space are at the core of her creative world, and they often entangle with extended techniques, electronics, and conceptual frameworks. Her work explores pre-linguistic rituals, nature, and the vulnerability of human beings situated in the hypermodern society. Yvonne’s music has been featured at the International Computer Music Conference, BlackHouse Collective, Music of Time (Finland), HighScore Festival, ICE Ensemble Revolution, Oregon Bach Festival, and more. She is the winner of the 2023 SFO Call for Scores and the UCSB Corwin Award, and honorably mentioned in competitions including the IAWM Search for New Music Competition and One Found Sound Emerging Composers Award. She holds dual B.A. degrees in Sociology and Musicology and an M.A. in Music Composition from UCLA. In her free time, Yvonne writes poetry, skateboards in her basement, and plays in a rock band.
* winner, Berklee College of Music internal music composition competition for ICMC Boston 2025
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