Before making Best Partners, I spent some time researching radio art and earlier sound works. During that process, I came across a piece that left a deep impression on me—Gregory Whitehead’s 1995 work On the Shore Dimly Seen. This piece uses the wireless telegraph communications from the sinking of the Titanic as its source material, weaving together fragmented Morse code, muffled underwater echoes, indistinct spoken words, and sudden cuts into silence. The first time I listened to it, what struck me most was its handling of silence: the radio signals had been sounding all along, and then suddenly there was nothing. Those few empty seconds hit harder than any sound could. I remember thinking, in a sound piece, a moment without speech or noise could carry that much weight. He also treated signal interference and distortion as narrative elements in their own right—not as flaws to be cleaned up, but as a way to express the difficulty of communication between people. This approach felt completely fresh to me, because I had never considered that noise itself could tell a story.
Later, when we started working on our own project, Best Partners, those insights stayed with me and kept shaping my decisions. For example, Whitehead treated the sound environment as a character, and that made me think: Xiao Liang and Da Lin have completely opposite personalities, so their sonic environments should be different too. Whenever Da Lin appears, you hear crisp, efficient sounds like flipping through folders. Xiao Liang, on the other hand, almost always enters accompanied by chaotic noises—a stuck backpack zipper, things dropping on the floor. These sonic distinctions lay out their personalities in an immediate, auditory way, for both the other character and the listener, without needing any extra lines of dialogue to explain. This idea shares a common thread with the clash between clear signals and noisy interference in On the Shore Dimly Seen, except I translated that conflict from technical signals into the everyday sounds of life.
What influenced me most was the use of silence. I felt a strong urge to leave a moment, right after the grandmother reveals the truth, where everything and everyone simply stops. I asked QDY how many seconds would work there. She said it couldn’t be too long, or the music wouldn’t be able to re-enter smoothly. Ken also said that too long a pause might make listeners think the audio had cut out. But we all felt that without a pause at that moment, the emotion wouldn’t have space to turn. In the end, we settled on two seconds. Those two seconds were something On the Shore Dimly Seen taught me—sometimes the moment that moves listeners most isn’t about what you add, but what you choose to withhold. When the sound suddenly disappears, the listener’s own heartbeat and breathing get pushed to the foreground, and they start filling in all the unspoken things inside their own mind.
Although the two works ended up with entirely different emotional registers—Whitehead’s is tragic and filled with lost connection, while ours is warm and pulls back towards reconciliation—I’m very clear that my understanding of sound was opened up by that earlier piece. Doing the research first, then getting my hands dirty, meant that throughout the writing and recording process I carried a quiet awareness: sound is not decoration. Where language cannot reach, sound can go; and where sound cannot reach, silence can go. A lot of what lies at the heart of our Best Partners actually came from there.
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