10. Entering the Yellow River Delta Wetlands (2026)
Interview
A Single Tree
Dongying Port (38.07331°N, 118.97645°E)
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Site3
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Site7
Yellow River Delta Wetlands, Dongying, China
Field Research / Aerial Moving Image / Sound / Environmental Data / Ecological Observation
Entering the Yellow River Delta Wetlands (2026) documents the second phase of my field research in the Yellow River Delta, the primary field site of my doctoral project Ecosound Notation. This phase began with an interview with my grandfather, one of the first generation of Shengli Oilfield workers, who participated in the development of the Gudong Oilfield and the construction of its oil extraction infrastructure. Returning with him to sites connected to this history, I asked about the working conditions of the time, his memories of the landscape, the sounds of machinery, and the ecological changes he had witnessed through decades of oil-field development.
This intergenerational oral history offered another way of entering the site: not only through present-day observation, but through lived memory. The Gudong area, shaped by large-scale oil development and the legacy of the Gudong Campaign, became a place where industrial history, personal memory and ecological transformation could be considered together.
Alongside these interviews, I expanded my earlier ground-level methods of listening, field recording and material observation through aerial documentation and preliminary environmental measurements. Drone footage introduced a shift in scale. From above, waterways, reed beds, coastlines, roads, oil pumpjacks and other industrial infrastructures become visible as interconnected patterns across the land. Rather than separating the “natural” from the “industrial”, this aerial perspective reveals how different forces occupy, divide and overlap within the same ecological terrain.
I also used mobile devices to conduct preliminary tests of mechanical vibration and environmental noise around industrial structures, generating an initial layer of quantitative data alongside field recordings and visual observations. These exploratory measurements serve as preparation for later fieldwork using dedicated sensors to investigate vibration and other environmental conditions more systematically.
Moving between oral history, embodied observation, aerial imaging, sound recording and environmental measurement, this phase of fieldwork examines the wetland across multiple temporal, spatial and perceptual scales. The resulting archive brings together industrial memory, ecological change and present-day sensory data, providing material for subsequent experiments in translating sonic, spatial and material traces into Ecosound Notation.
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liangchennn.sui@gmail.com；slcbeihang@163.com Liangchen Sui ©️2026 London, Shanghai