Ng Sze Min: Harmonising Ecosystems through Audio Production

The soft clicking of cables connecting, the rapping of mics being tested, and the faint aroma of coffee in the cosy office at Centre 42 come to mind when I recollect one of the last times I’d caught up with Ng Sze Min. It was 2021, and we had been working on the arts management podcast Backlogues, my focus being on content, and hers on audio production. Three eventful years later, after our careers took us in different directions, we’re reconnecting online. A ping sounds from my laptop, and I expand the window to see Sze Min’s bright, warm smile. The audio producer, songwriter, and co-founder of sound design outfit Artwave Studio, is speaking to me on Google Meet from New Zealand.

She is travelling on a year-long work visa with her partner in life and work, musician and producer Pan Zai’En. This sabbatical is fitting, following a series of dynamic and varied musical and audio-based projects that shaped the early years of her career. Having graduated in Interactive Composition from the University of Melbourne in 2017, Sze Min has staged sound installations and interactive communal music-making sessions in Australia and Southeast Asia as a solo artist. Co-founding Artwave with Zai En in 2018 led to collaborative partnerships with diverse community groups such as Coastal Natives, National Museum of Singapore and ART:DIS. 

Through immersive soundscapes and auditory experiences, the studio has created new approaches to discovering ocean ecologies, climate issues, traditional cuisine, local heritage, and more. Whether as a solo artist or as part of Artwave, it's safe to say it’s been a busy half a decade for Sze Min.

It’s understandable, then, that she’d be taking a breather at this point. "I'm in New Zealand because I needed to stretch and test my body, and see and learn new things,” she shares. “While work has slowed down, we continue to manage our projects remotely. We're still continuing our long-term partnership with Centre 42, producing audio plays."

It was at Centre 42 that Sze Min and I first met. We were both participants in the Points of View workshop organised by the Asian Dramaturgs Network (run by Centre 42).

The workshop took place over ten days in May 2018. While we took the workshop in different “tracks” based on our respective practices — I in Performance Writing, and she in Performance Making — we were both emerging practitioners in our own fields, learning how to experience art in new ways. "That year was my first as a sound designer, and my first encounter with Centre 42,” she recalls. “Over the week-long series of readings, shows, and discussions, I got to meet my contemporaries from theatre — many of whom became some of my first collaborators, and even long-term friends.”

Having myself been one of those friends and collaborators¹, what has often struck me is Sze Min’s ability to find creative opportunities amid the restrictions and curveballs that often arise when working on commissions with multiple stakeholders. Beneath her blithe and unassuming demeanour blooms an unwavering openness and attention to people and the environment. It’s a kind of enthusiastic curiosity, a perpetual dwelling in possibility, that is essential to working as an artist, and it shows in her range of work and adaptability to changing cultural landscapes.

Take the upheaval of the pandemic, for instance. It was during that trying post-pandemic period, when artists struggled to reconcile their capabilities with the demands of a digital and socially distanced world, that Artwave found themselves well-equipped to connect people and stories through the power of sound. 2021 marked a pivotal year for Artwave’s relationship with Centre 42.

That year, Artwave worked with Centre 42 on producing a podcast series titled The Three Bells². “That project has changed our lives the most,” Sze Min emphasises. Now into its fourth season, the podcast explores the evolving cultural landscape in urban areas, interviewing cultural and civic leaders to understand emerging developments and latent opportunities.“I learnt from leaders around the world during the pandemic, and it gave me so much perspective about where I am, and where we are at collectively, culturally. After every edit, Zai and I would launch into a discussion about leadership and cultural crisis management. It was like a Podcast Club between us!”

2021 also saw Artwave build a recording booth in the Centre 42 office, fitting it with movable panels, microphones, and a mixer. The Centre’s annual Year-End-Review, typically held as a bustling, thronging, physical event, took on the form of a radio show in 2021. Artwave ran a full-day radio programme facilitated by the Channel News Theatre Telegram channel.

It was accompanied by a socially-distanced in-person Listening Party on the premises, where visitors could reserve “listening pods” to sit and tune into a variety of discussions about the local arts scene. “At that time, Zai and I had just gotten married,” Sze Min recalls. “It was the beginning of spending our anniversaries celebrating at C42.” 

Later that year, Artwave was hired to produce Backlogues, and I came on board as content producer. Every other week for six months, we’d come together with some of Singapore’s pioneering arts managers and cultural workers to record lesser-known oral histories of local performing arts history. 

For each episode, Artwave would produce a raw cut and transcript, on which I’d make content edits. They would clean up the track accordingly, and through the whole process, both of us marvelled at the fascinating and inspiring stories from Singapore’s cultural history which laid the foundation for where we work today.

Reminiscing on that shared experience, I remark on how she has come a long way from my previous interview with her for Arts Equator, which revolved around her songwriting process and community-based artmaking as a solo artist. Artwave, and Sze Min’s role in it, have taken on many shifts in form and function. She nods along: the changes have been quite unlike anything she had foreseen. She even reveals she doesn’t quite regard herself as an artist, much to my surprise.

“Honestly, I feel less and less like an artist, over the years,” she confesses. She explains that at this stage in her work with Artwave, she considers herself more of a creative producer or project manager than an artist per se. Instead of composing or harmonising sounds (in early solo works such as Paper Orchestra), she is now harmonising people, ideas, objectives, and workflows. “I’m not focused so much on the work itself but the ecosystem in which it develops.”

Nurturing creative ecosystems through audio production is close to Sze Min’s heart. Following their work on Backlogues in 2022, Artwave held a series of workshops at Centre 42 on podcasting, studio recording, and audio editing, open to both arts practitioners and anyone interested in the medium. “Audio, for me, has always been a stage,” she affirms. Following the pandemic’s disruption of live performance, audio storytelling has proven itself as a self-contained medium of immersive communication. Not only does it have a sense of intimacy and accessibility, it’s easier to produce, and broadens the evolving artistic landscape. In 2023, Artwave produced the Waterloo Street Stories audio play series with Centre 42, cementing their steadfast advocacy for the power of the medium in developing artists and creatives. “I sincerely hope that more writers and actors take this opportunity to collaborate on simple recording projects,” she emphasises. “Not every written play ends up on stage. So if you’re a writer wanting to test your writing or an actor learning to use a microphone, get together and record a playback of your own voices!”

Sze Min's prop of choice for this photoshoot is simple and self-evident: a pair of headphones, the first equipment she purchased as a composition student learning to edit audio. "Fun fact: a very good pair can last you for years," she adds. "The two headphones we use in the studio are both Zai’s and my first pair since we were 17. They’ve been with us for more than 10 years!"

"Putting on headphones has taken on different meanings in my personal life," she continues. "In my teenage years it was an escape from reality. Now, it means I'm living my dream. One day when my ears don’t work as well anymore, I’ll have to hang them up. But my lessons on listening will outlast it, with all the wisdom and joy from learning to listen."

On the occasion of Centre 42’s 10th anniversary, she shares, in her buoyantly forward-looking manner, “I hope to be able to wish Centre 42 a happy 15th anniversary! When you become a teenager, I hope you are surrounded with lots of friends, young and old, at the big blue house. I hope you’ll be giving public tours about all the cultural historical events you’ve beheld. I hope you’ll always be abundant with books, stories, voices and music. I hope you will capture every young person’s imagination who has something to say. I wish for all these things. You are magic!”

Centre 42 celebrates our 10th Anniversary in 2024, marking ten years of supporting the theatre community around us. As part of our anniversary celebrations, we chart the growth of 10 noteworthy practitioners who have worked with us in the past decade, through a series of editorials that trace their personal and artistic development and Centre 42's role in their journeys so far. 

Read the other articles in this series: