White Mountain Black Water is an interactive sound installation inspired by Japanese designer Kenya Hara’s “Water Pachinko“. In this project, we were asking: “ What if water can sing ? ”

It is created as an installation where people could enjoy dropping dyed water to a white hydrophobic board and looking at the water running down in a form similar to mercury, at the same time listening to the music created by the moving water.

We name it literally by its look, the white board indicates mountain, the black water is the ink dyed water, interestingly, in Chinese, that is how people call my home province in China, so this is the story of the name.

We adopt Eastern Asian aesthetic and keep everything simple, we only use basic colors black and white, they are most used color in this world and opposite to each other, in this installation, only when the two colors meet each other, as the black water dropping to the white board and starts running down, the magic begins.

Also, we design the sound generated by the water to be soothing and organic, we would like the audience to feel peaceful and relaxed when they drop the water and hear the sound, some audience commented that it felt like sitting in a zen garden and receiving surrounding nature sounds, I was also imaging myself in a temple listening to water running down and hitting stones when I was making the sounds.

Personally, I am very interested in listening to water sounds like rains, streams and water falls, water is the most regular object that come to our lives everyday and most of our body is water, as well as our home planet.

In many cultures, water flow is also associated with music and eloquence because they share the similar flow motion, I would like to explore more about the topic of water and sounds in the future.

The pattern on the board is actually Chinese Bagua Symbols, which are 8 symbols represent the fundamental principles of reality, they are also referred as Eight Trigrams in English. The upper part represents mountain, the lower represents water. The top and bottom triangle like pattern imitates the simplified shape of a mountain (top), and the river or waterfall (bottom) running down the stream.