Everything I Know Comes From Listening
EVERYTHING I KNOW COMES FROM LISTENING
Workshop by Syafiq Halid
Sounds — whether music, jingles, phonemes, or even everyday noises — often carry through, together with their meaning associations, with us across time.
What then can the simple but radical act of listening offer as a gesture?
In this listening session, sonic artist Syafiq Halid will bring participants through a personal listening journey that examines and centres relational listening as an act of non-institutional research. Beginning with his own history of listening to and collecting music and sounds, Syafiq will share how these accumulated sonic encounters have shaped the way he learns, remembers and makes connections. Rejecting rigid technical hierarchies, Syafiq will share how his personal methodology of “stacking” diverse sonic influences — from percussion and world music to peer-to-peer music distribution and pop culture — has developed into a practice of building personal sonic libraries, where sounds become references, memories and tools for artistic thinking.
For Syafiq, this session is also a first moment of opening up and sharing this journey so openly — a gentle (re)introduction to nearly twenty years of practising, collecting, listening and making with the things he loves. Rather than presenting a definitive methodology, he offers his own accumulated experiences as an invitation to listen alongside him and to consider how the sounds we collect, encounter and carry with us can become a form of personal knowledge.
About the Artist
Syafiq Halid is a manipulator of sound, an electronic artist and an experimental percussionist based in Singapore. His experience spans traditional, multidisciplinary and contemporary performance projects as an artist, sound designer, composer and field recordist. He has presented work in Asia Pacific such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Australia and has worked with collaborators and companies at platforms like the Esplanade, National Gallery Singapore, ArtScience Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Nusasonic, Goethe Institute. *SCAPE and Bus Projects.
Summoning sounds, aesthetics, metaphors, and experiences of the Malay world, Syafiq's compositions traverse the grey realms that exist between the traditional and the contemporary. His creations deconstruct, exploit, bastardise and reimagine these sounds, manifesting them into an experimental sonic language unique to Southeast Asia. His explorations speak deeply to the realities and fluctuations of living and being Malay in Singapore and the region. They compel us to confront our relationship with the region through artistic and cultural wisdoms rooted deep within us.
Syafiq is also the Founder of Grid Culture, an electronic music academy and the only Ableton Certified Training Centre in Singapore. As an educator, he has worked with institutions such as NUS Centre for the Arts on their Four Blank Walls series and has been an Ableton Certified Trainer since 2016.
This workshop is presented as part of Codependent Curricular Activities, an artist takeover programme presented and produced by ToNewEntities, and curated by Rafi Abdullah. The programme is supported by the National Arts Council's Arts x Tech Lab initiative. The Lab nurtures Singapore's arts x tech community, driving new artistic endeavours and bridging arts and technology conversations to develop Singapore's vibrant arts scene.
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