This seven-minute electroacoustic composition draws inspiration from the painting Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan, a Chinese landscape painter of the Song dynasty. The composition largely focused on exploring various techniques and processed electronics of the traditional Chinese plucked instrument pipa and modular synthesizer.

 

The sonic features of this composition aim to describe the painting technique known as “raindrop stroke,” where each brushstroke resembles tiny raindrops, accumulating like grains of sand, little by little meticulously forming the landscape. Starting with a close-up view from the painting, the composition first depicts a caravan traversing the mountains. Gradually, the giant, towering peaks and the magnificent waterfalls cascading forcefully above a dark valley in the distant landscape are revealed by interweaved sounds of pipa, synthesizer, and processed electronics. In addition, in the middle part of the painting, in contrast to the direction of the caravan’s journey, a monk is walking in the opposite direction of the caravan toward the temple on the right side. The composition juxtaposes the mundane and the spiritual by overlapping and contrasting different sounds to motivate the listeners to ponder the significance of life from the Daoist perspective.