ICMC BOSTON 2025

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Curiosity, Play, Innovation - A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Creativity in Music, Science, and Technology

June 8-14, 2025

ICMC BOSTON 2025: Online Listening Room #4

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ID#: 247

Oblivious… (2023) ; 8:00

by Shupeng Cao

University of South Carolina

“Oblivious…” is a sonic elegy for voices that were never heard. Composed from audio fragments drawn from personal videos and recordings during the strict COVID-19 lockdowns in China, this fixed media work transforms cries, pleas, and testimonies into ghostly textures. These voices—once raw with suffering—are sampled, digitally disguised, and rendered into sounds that no longer resemble speech, yet still carry its emotional charge. What remains is not language, but memory in its most fragile form. The title, Oblivious…, refers not only to those who ignored or suppressed these stories, but also to the deeper mechanisms of forgetting—voluntary and involuntary, personal and collective. In a world where forgetting can be a form of survival, the piece reflects on the cost of silence and the power of indifference. This work is not an act of erasure, but a quiet attempt to restore presence to the disappeared, and to lend voice to those denied one. Oblivious… forms part of a broader narrative I have been exploring through a sequence of pieces since 2023—a surreal parable about secret languages, unspoken traumas, and a society that builds candy houses atop buried sorrow. In that imagined world, forgetting is celebrated, and silence is mistaken for peace. Through this piece, I resist that dreamlike oblivion—not by retelling the stories, but by letting them resonate in another form. The sonic materials were shaped using techniques such as granular synthesis, spectral processing, extreme time-stretching, and other digital transformations. These processes allowed me to dissolve speech into texture, to smudge memory into sound, and to hold space for a mourning that remains nameless, yet felt.

Shupeng Cao

Shupeng Cao is a composer, improviser, and educator based in Columbia, SC. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources such as nature, science, the arts, language, socio-political issues, and everyday events, his music showcases a rich and multifaceted voice. His works have been performed and read by ensembles and artists such as the Orange Road Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Parker Quartet, The Westerlies, Dal Niente, and many other ensembles and performers. In 2022, Shupeng received the Whittaker Composition Commission Funds Award for his string quartet—A Sliver of Sky. In 2024, he was honored with the John and Lucrecia Herr Award for Outstanding Student Composition at the University of South Carolina. His current and upcoming projects include Rewind for the UofSC Campus Orchestra, Loquats for SATB choir in collaboration with American poet Sarah Selke, and Figurations for piano and electronics for pianist Jiamo Zhang. Beyond composition, Shupeng embraces improvisation as an essential aspect of his artistic practice, engaging in sound experimentation and real-time interaction. As a former leader of Uncaged at East Carolina University, he collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Trust and visual artist Nathalie Miebach and performed works by Frederic Rzewski, Richard Nelson, Danny Clay, and others. As a graduate assistant at the University of South Carolina, Shupeng teaches undergraduate theory, aural skills, and studio composition classes. He is also the instructor of Musikaleidoscope, a creative composition course designed for children aged 9–12. Shupeng is currently pursuing a D.M.A. in Composition at the University of South Carolina, studying with Dr. John Fitz Rogers and Dr. Fang Man. He earned his M.M. in Composition at East Carolina University and his B.A. in Economics at the College of William and Mary.

soundcloud.com/shupeng-cao