Family Association (2022)

What is Family Association?

Family Association is an exploratory, immersive soundwalk for Manhattan’s Chinatown. As you walk through the streets, you will hear fragments of oral history interviews alongside music inspired by the recorded speech. At any given point during the 17-minute experience, your location in the neighborhood determines the stories and music that you hear. As a result, each soundwalk yields a unique experience.

Interviewees

• Eugenie Chan

• Jerllin Cheng

• Frank Gee

• Karen Liu

• Han Yu

Instrumentalists

• Patrick Yim, violin

• Hannah Collins, cello

• Zach Herchen, saxophone

• Michael Compitello, percussion

• Dorothy Chan, piano

Production

• George Tsz-Kwan Lam, composer

• Shreyas Jadhav, software development

• Taylor Snead, software development

• Halsey Burgund, software development

• Zach Herchen, lead audio engineer

• Ian Teraoka, visual designer

• Michelle Tabnick, publicist

Download The App

Experience the Family Association soundwalk with the free iOS app, now available on the App Store. It’s the preferred way for iOS users to experience Family Association along with your favorite earbuds. Even if you’re not in NYC, drag the map to explore a virtual soundwalk!

Have an Android device or using a computer? Use the Chrome browser for best results and head to https://familyassociation.app to experience Family Association! If you are located away from NYC, tap “Play” and try dragging the map to Manhattan’s Chinatown for a virtual soundwalk.

Preface

Building on my recent project (The Emigrants) with oral history and musical placemaking, Family Association is a new site-specific, geolocation-enabled piece that uses collected oral history recordings from five members of the Chinese-American community as part of an interactive soundwalk in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Listeners will hear interviewees’ memories of their extended families, how their families emigrated to the United States, and whom they imagine their ancestors to be — including those who left their homeland to seek a new future in the U.S. decades (and perhaps centuries) ago. Using GPS technology, Family Association embeds the audio within sites of various “family associations” in Chinatown; such associations have created tight-knit, supportive, social, and imagined communities based on a common family name. These associations in the neighborhood serve as a way for the listener to interact with the stories that they hear.

In Family Association, the listener will use a GPS-enabled smartphone app as they freely explore Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. As the work begins, the speech is more fragmented, interspersed with musical gestures inspired by the rhythms and melodic contours of the recorded speech. When the listener approaches the site of a family association, the speech becomes more whole, recalling the way in which these micro-communities have helped generations of Chinese-Americans to both reconstruct and reconnect with their past. Over the course of the 15-minute experience, the recorded testimony gradually focuses on the interviewees’ vision of their legacy for the next generation.

Family Association is co-presented by The Performance Project at University Settlement and MATA Presents, and is made possible with support from Music At The Anthology, Inc. (MATA), and from a Faculty Impact Fund grant from the Faculty of Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. Family Association’s app is developed with the open-source Roundware framework.

The open-source codebase for Family Association’s apps is available via GitHub. The codebase is based on the similarly open-source Roundware platform, which is also available on GitHub.