Family Association

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.

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.

Download and print out this free guide map as you explore Chinatown. Please be especially careful of your surroundings throughout the 17-minute 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

University Settlement partners with 40,000 New Yorkers on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn every year to build on their strengths as they achieve healthy, stable, and remarkable lives. For 135 years, we’ve collaborated with our communities to pioneer highly effective programs that fight poverty and systemic inequality. Established in 1886 as the first Settlement House in the United States, we bring the values of that movement into the 21st century by meeting New Yorkers where they live, listening to their perspectives, recognizing their excellence, understanding them as complete individuals, and creating space for them to organize. Joining together with our neighbors to advocate for justice and equality, we help build community strength. Since 2007, The Performance Project has been offering local young artists and professional emerging artists opportunities to connect, create and publicly present new work. We support artists who are interested in how live art can heal, empower and activate. 

Music at the Anthology (MATA) is an incubator for adventurous emerging artists experimenting with composition, multi-media, collaborative performance art, and every imaginable sound in between. We present, support, and commission the music of early-career composers, regardless of their stylistic views or aesthetic inclinations. Founded by Philip Glass, Eleonor Sandresky, and Lisa Bielawa in 1996 as a way to address the lack of presentation opportunities for unaffiliated composers, MATA has since developed into the world’s most sought-after performance opportunity for young and emerging composers. MATA presents an internationally-recognized festival each spring in New York City of new music by early-career composers selected from a free global call for submissions; MATA Presents, commissioned projects presented at venues and non-conventional spaces throughout New York; and MATA Jr., an evening of music by pre-college composers, mentored by emerging composers, and performed by top performers in new music.

The Faculty of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University provides a liberal arts education that is truly liberating, nurturing individuals with the knowledge, freedom of vision, and creative skills they need to function as effective members of their communities. Through a research-based synthesis of theoretical and applied approaches, and by combining learning with service, we inspire students to channel their imaginations into artistic creation and critical thought. Our emphasis on creativity and critical thinking offers opportunities to interrogate prejudice and to question established norms and values, just as it nurtures the aspiration to bring newness into the world. We foster in students a desire for self-improvement in the ethical choices they make, their sense of local and global citizenship, their capacity for meaningful action, and their ability to develop artistic and intellectual responses. We imbue students with a passion for learning, problem solving, and community, our view being that this crucial lifelong resource will help them face the inevitable challenges of life. Our commitment to liberal arts education is reflected in our firm belief that we, as teachers and researchers, learn as much from our students as we do from our scholarly and creative endeavors.

Roundware is an open, flexible, distributed framework which collects, stores, organizes and re-presents audio content. It lets you collect audio from anyone with a smartphone or web access, upload it to a central repository along with its metadata and then filter it and play it back collectively in continuous audio streams. The Family Association app is being developed with help from sound artist and technologist Halsey Burgund, who has been developing Roundware to enable his sound installations since 2007. Roundware originated as the technical infrastructure for his sound art installation ROUND, on exhibit at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in mid-2008. All of Halsey’s installations and musical performances make extensive use of spoken human voice recordings as musical elements, alongside traditional and electronic instruments. He collects these voices from otherwise uninvolved individuals whom he records in various locations, from museums to street corners to rock clubs.