In this book, WANG Jing offers the reader the unique opportunity to investigate sonic creativity within but mainly outside of academe in China ranging from sound art to experimental and electroacoustic music to DIY culture and electronic instrument building. The historical discussion covers much ground but is not restricted to a multi-strand survey. Key to her approach is the investigation of Chinese cultural and philosophical elements that permeate this substantial body of creative work demonstrating beyond any doubt that experimentalism with sound in China is hardly a simple reflection of developments from other, mainly western countries but is instead largely deeply rooted in Chinese traditions, some ancient, related to sound, to <i>qi</i> and much more.

Leigh Landy, Director, Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University, UK

If sound is <i>qi</i>, resonating, Chinese sound art animated by <i>qi</i> lives in the resonances that arise in the mutating, overlapping atmospheres of state power plays and works of artistic resistance. In this stunning book, Jing Wang audits pieces that mobilize clock hearts, crowd shouts, cybernetic dissonance, and strategic silence to jolt us into an active attention to how violence and defiance are made and born in the ambient sounds of everyday life.

Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT, USA

<i>Half Sound, Half Philosophy</i> is the first major study of Chinese sound art and its affinity to ancient Qi-philosophy, an organic, holistic and enchanted worldview that stands in marked contrast to the commercialism and individualization of post-Mao China. Erudite and being attuned to the subtle play of resonances and the subliminal in the acoustics of Qi, Wang’s book is destined to become a classic of sound art scholarship and sound studies more broadly.

Veit Erlmann, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin, USA, and editor of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal