About Zhao Jiajing
Spatial music composer and interdisciplinary sound artist
空间音乐作曲家 · 跨学科声音艺术家
Zhao Jiajing (赵嘉旌; surname Zhao) is a spatial music composer and interdisciplinary sound artist. He works with space as a core artistic medium, composing spatial forms and structures that shape embodied listening. Through sound, space and technology, he explores how worlds are sensed, constructed and inhabited, including phenomena and scales beyond ordinary human perception.
Across acousmatic music, live performance and installation, he translates concepts into spatial structures, finding, adapting or building the technologies that give them form. Through coding, physical prototyping and the repurposing of existing systems, he makes loudspeaker arrays, recording devices and machine-learning models part of the work’s expressive language. He also develops listening and recording methods that explore underwater sound, electromagnetic activity and vibrations transmitted through the ground and the body, transforming these into sonic structures that extend ordinary listening. These practices make abstract processes perceptible and explore how technology shapes relationships between bodies and the spaces they inhabit.
His composition FOMO was selected to represent the ISCM British Section at the 2026 ISCM World New Music Days in Bucharest. His work has been presented by Ars Electronica, IRCAM, ZKM Karlsruhe, ICMC, GMEM, SICMF and ORF musikprotokoll. He has received recognition and commissions from Musica Nova, Musicacoustica, the Shanghai International Arts Festival, Computer Space and Aesthetica.
Zhao holds an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art and is pursuing a PhD on “Ecological Approaches to Spatial Music Experience” at the University of the Arts London (CRiSAP). He has also taught as a visiting lecturer on the MA Designing Audio Experiences programme at University College London.
CV available upon request via email.
Statement
When I place myself within a body of sound, I’m captivated by its ability to transcend the purely aural and physical experience. Within sound, I can often see, touch, and even smell, sensing a world, if not multiple worlds, unfolding around me. This embodied listening lies at the centre of my compositions and sound art practice, shaping how I create and experience work.
Every sound contains its own space. Since 2019, I have been deeply immersed in the world of spatial sound, exploring its many forms, from Ambisonic compositions to multichannel sonic installations. At times, I see myself as both artist and architect, navigating the delicate intersection between acousmatic and physical environments. I am drawn to the potential of space as an expressive medium—one capable of articulating concepts that reach beyond the limits of sound and music.
My curiosity extends naturally across disciplines. I am endlessly fascinated by the moment when new forms and ideas emerge from the collision of diverse fields, and this fascination drives me to collaborate with visual artists, theatre-makers, scientists, and others: an ecologist’s wetland, a biologist’s sequencing data, a physicist’s condensate have each become material. These encounters leave their mark on my work with sound and space, while in turn my practice feeds back into those fields.
The contemporary world often feels fast-paced, dataist, and relentlessly distracting. Living within it unsettles many, including myself. Music and art are my intuitive responses to the collective anxiety of this hyperactive age. My work draws on first-hand experience of contemporary crises: acceleration, surveillance, the attention economy, ecological loss. These are problems of scale as much as of feeling: too much, too fast, too small or too vast for one body to hold. Sound, spread through space, is how I bring them back within reach of the senses. Through my practice, I pursue an ongoing existential inquiry—a quiet insistence on being in a world that so often feels abstract and disembodied.
Outside the studio, I love to explore nature: the ocean, forests, mountains, seeking scales of time and space so vast that our fleeting human existence feels insignificant. In these moments, I can step away from the fast-shifting human world and look deeper into the meaning of life.