Walking Hanoi - Reflections on improvisation, listening and being attached

Franziska Schroeder, Queen’s University Belfast, 2024

Before reading this text, I would like to encourage you to listen/experience the main A/V piece first of all, using good quality headphones (if you have!).

This audio-visual piece emerged from a profound and growing love for Vietnam—its people, culture, music, and cuisine. My first experience with the country in 2017, well before the pandemic disrupted our world, became a pivotal moment. It introduced me to the lives and stories of Vietnamese women who had been affected by breast cancer. Together with them, themselves local artists, and with global health researchers, we curated a collection of these women’s artworks, highlighting the medical and cultural challenges surrounding breast cancer awareness in Vietnam. This initiative was as much about confronting stigmas as it was about highlighting the silent narratives entwined with the disease.

During that initial visit, Hanoi’s soundscape felt markedly different. The city’s sensory layers were more than just urban noise; they sounded the pulse of history, tradition, and change. The sounds of Hoan Kiem Lake, also known as Sword Lake, nestled in the historic heart of Hanoi, became a poignant memory for me. Snippets of these sounds from 2017 now resurface in this piece, providing a kind of auditory time capsule, capturing both a specific moment in time and the more enduring resonance of the city’s essence.

Since that first visit, I have returned to Vietnam multiple times, each visit deepening my connection to the country’s stories and its people. What began as a singular experience blossomed into an evolving dialogue with Vietnam’s cultural and social landscape, a conversation shaped by mutual respect and curiosity. Each journey back to Hanoi brought with it new layers of understanding, strengthening my bond.

A pivotal point in this relationship was meeting Kim Ngoc, a Vietnamese composer, improviser, and sound artist. In 2012, Ngoc had founded DomDom, the first independent interdisciplinary center in Vietnam dedicated to experimental music. This vibrant community quickly became a home for me, offering a space where traditional Vietnamese music could be explored in tandem with experimental practices. Within DomDom, I found a group of kindred spirits—musicians, improvisers, and sound artists—who would become not just collaborators but close friends. DomDom’s ethos of pushing boundaries, fostering collaboration, while exploring and sustaining Vietnam’s cultural heritage, created the perfect environment for me to continue my own exploration of improvisation.

In 2023, I returned to Hanoi once again, this time invited by DomDom. Along with a group of Vietnamese musicians, we engaged in an evening of improvisation that fused traditional Vietnamese and Western instruments with the ambient sounds of Vietnam’s streets. Improvisers had brought their own soundscapes to the concert which they played during the improvised performance, but also, the sounds from the streets in Hanoi permeated and flowed into gallery space in which we played.

This sonic exploration was underscored by my interest in improvisation as both a musical and philosophical practice. Improvisation, in this sense, becomes a method of engaging with the world, not only through sound but through a broader perceptual and cognitive process. During my 2023 visit, a collective realisation emerged: Vietnam’s incredible musical diversity, particularly among its 54 ethnic minorities, was in urgent need of deeper exploration, preservation, and archiving. This realisation catalysed a 2024 project, supported by DomDom, Vietnam National University and Queen’s University Belfast, plus a team of international and Vietnamese artists, researchers, and academics, to address this need. The project is still ongoing...

The project’s first day began with an improvisatory, multi-sensory walk through Hanoi’s streets, designed to encourage deep listening and exploration. Dividing into small groups, participants embarked on what was intended to be both a meditative and improvisational journey. Inspired by the work of German-born sound artist Hildegard Westerkamp, the walk focused on attuning to the city’s acoustic environment, learning to hear and appreciate the sounds that often go unnoticed. Westerkamp’s philosophy suggests that through listening deeply, one can find beauty in the ordinary and the unexpected, in the harmonies and dissonances that define a place’s unique voice.

As the walk unfolded, I began to drift away from the group, slipping into my own sound world. Encased in in-ear microphones, I found myself in a private sonic space, removed from the collective but intimately connected to the pulse of Hanoi. Improvisation, which has long been a central part of my musical practice, became the lens through which I interpreted this experience. As a saxophonist, the fluidity and spontaneity of improvisation informs not only my music but my broader worldview, allowing me to respond to the environment in real time, shaping and being shaped by the sounds and sights around me.

Improvisation, in this piece, serves as a form of creative inquiry. Anthropologist Daniel Everett’s reflections on tacit knowledge—knowledge that arises from personal, embodied experience—resonate with my understanding of how I engaged in an improvisatory way with Hanoi.

Drawing on the works of Aristotle and Michael Polanyi, Everett highlights how unspoken, often ineffable knowledge shapes one’s internal perspective. This internal perspective, or ‘insider point of view / point of listening’ becomes a central theme in my piece, framing my perception of self in relation to my surroundings.

Improvisation, then, is not just a musical practice but a means of navigating the world. As improviser David Borgo argues, improvisation is inherently dynamic, adaptive, and open to surprise. It encourages a flexible, responsive way of being, where the unknown is not feared but embraced. For me, this open-endedness is essential to both my music and my academic work, forming a bridge between the subjective experience of the world and broader cultural and philosophical insights.

During the roughly two-hour walk, chance became an integral part of the process, with participants occasionally using the throw of a dice to guide their path. This randomness reinforced the improvisational nature of the experience, allowing participants to engage with Hanoi’s urban environment in an embodied, sensory way. The walk became a microcosm of the larger project, where walking, hearing, listening, sensing, and seeing intertwined to create a rich tapestry of perception.

In this piece, I reflect on this embodied engagement with the city, drawing parallels with Heidegger’s concept of Da-Sein, or being-in-the-world. For Heidegger, the act of being present in the world is inherently performative, shaped by both presence and temporality. The improvisatory nature of the walk, and indeed of my broader practice, is a manifestation of this performative act. The process of being-there, in the streets of Hanoi, becomes an improvisation in itself, a dialogue between myself and the urban environment.

As the walk progressed, I began to reflect not only on the act of listening, but on who was listening to whom. This introspection led to a heightened situational awareness, prompting me to question my own presence in the environment. Simon Waters’ concept of "un-privileging one’s own contribution" became a useful framework for understanding this dynamic. By attempting to step outside of an ego-centric perspective, I sought to listen not just to the sounds close by, but to the city’s voice itself.

Reflecting on this experience, I acknowledge the complexities of my positionality as a foreigner, a white woman moving through Hanoi’s streets. My presence inevitably drew attention, yet I aimed to foreground the context, the soundscape, and the environment, rather than my own actions. This tension between the self and the world, between subjectivity and the external environment, recalls Donna Haraway’s notion of bodies as "material-semiotic generative nodes." For Haraway, the body’s boundaries materialise in social interaction, a concept that resonates with my improvisatory exploration of Hanoi.

The audio-visual piece that emerged from this experience is a reflection of my multi-sensory, improvisatory journey. Combining soundscape recordings from Hanoi, composed sonic material, and an extended reflective text, the piece offers a sensory exploration of the urban environment, inviting the audience to engage with the world through a similar spirit of improvisation and openness.

Ultimately, my ongoing engagement with Vietnam, from the initial 2017 collaboration with breast cancer survivors to the 2024 project on ethnic minority music, reflects a deep commitment to understanding and preserving the country’s cultural heritage.

Improvisation, as both a musical practice and a philosophical approach, becomes the guiding principle for this exploration—a way of navigating the world that is responsive, open, and grounded in the immediacy of embodied experience.

Through sound, space, and reflection, I hope to offer a meditation on the rich, complex interplay between the self and the world, both in Vietnam and beyond.

I hope you find something in this piece that resonates with you !