Hoi Tong Keung

Research Assistant

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About

Hong Kong-native Hoi Tong Keung considers herself more than a percussionist. Her encounter with theatrical percussion has opened up her senses to see, hear, and feel more as a musician. In addition to theatrical elements, Hoi Tong hopes to expand the sonic possibilities of her performance. Last summer, she participated in Levy Lorenzo’s Technology for Performance seminar, in which she built electronic musical instruments and wrote etudes for them. She used to be intimidated by pieces with electronics; after attending some TaPIR workshops, she is looking forward to overcoming the challenge of performing electroacoustic works in the coming year.

Projects

Frolic

by Fish Yu

Fish Yu and KöNG Duo (Bevis and Hoi Tong) collaborated to create Frolic, a multimedia four-movement work exploring games in Hong Kong through percussion, spoken Cantonese, theatre, projections, and electronics. One of the challenges of creating this work is the interaction between the marimba and malletSTATION (MIDI controller with a percussion keyboard layout). We premiered the work at Bevis’ recital on April 11, 2023. We will perform excerpts of the work at New Music Gathering this June.

Recreating the Impossible Vibraphone:
Realizing Stockhausen's Strahlen

Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote Strahlen (2002) for an “impossible vibraphone.” To realize Strahlen, the performer chooses nine out of ten parts to record, electronically manipulate, and then play back while performing the tenth part live. This project provides a method and template for realizing the piece by employing the “Migration methodology” of preserving digital data outlined by Travers and Hope (2013). Through the process of creating my realization of Strahlen, I explore the balance between following Stockhausen’s directions and simplifying the process to increase Strahlen’s accessibility to performers.

Poster from The Space Between Conference at McMaster University, April 29-30 2022

MadLib

MadLib is an electro-acoustic piece for open instrumentation with live electronics created using Max software. It was commissioned by Jonny Smith in 2021 from composer Louis Pino. The concept of this work was to create a piece that can be customized by the performer in a variety of ways thereby giving the performer greater creative agency and allowing for a wide array of potential musical outcomes. The concept of the piece is inspired by the word game, Mad Libs. In the game, the reader or group of readers is asked to think of and write down random words. These words are then used to fill in the blanks of a prewritten story, usually for comic effect. A core aspect of the piece is the performer uploading their own audio samples to then be manipulated by the patch in some preset and some personally customizable processes.

A study was held from October 4th to November 6th 2022, involving various TaPIR researchers learning, experimenting with, and recording their own versions of the piece. The goal of this experiment was to analyze how performers chose to perform and interact with the electronic accompaniment, and to evaluate the piece as a creative practical tool to aid in learning the Max software. MadLib premiered in April 2022 at The Space Between conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Both Smith and Pino performed their own versions of the piece in order to demonstrate how the piece can be shaped in a variety of ways by different performers.

Group Projects

Mikrophonie I

Click here for more information on Mikrophonie I