Returning Sound

Returning Sound—An alternative paradigm of music performance

The Hong Kong Arts Festival is committed to promoting inclusion through the arts. Since 2019, the Festival has co-presented No Limits with The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, offering barrier-free performances, education and community programmes that celebrate artists of different abilities and make the arts accessible to all. This year, the Festival extends this vision further into the local community by supporting Returning Sound, a music performance programme presented by the Research Centre for Creative Arts and Public Value (RCCAPV) of The Education University of Hong Kong (EduHK). Presented as part of the Festival’s PLUS programme, this collaboration affirms the importance of inclusive arts and the transformative role of creativity in widening participation, understanding and connection.

Created with individuals who have lost their natural voice due to cancer and surgery, Returning Sound celebrates the diverse journeys and collective resilience of survivors. An international collaboration between the celebrated UK-based charity helmed by Thomas Moors, Shout at Cancer, and the Hong Kong-based New Voice Club, accompanied by world music vocalist Anandi Bhattacharya and Canto-pop star Yoyo Sham, with compositions by Eugene Birman and Michael Chi-hin Leung and songs by Chow Yiu-fai, this evening-length performance explores how sound can return in unexpected ways—through community, listening, memory, and collective strength. What emerges is not simply recovery, but transformation: voices once marked by silence become deeply moving expressions of human endurance.

The project emerged from an initiative by the EduHK’s RCCAPV, encompassing years of research about the power of the arts as a vehicle for transformative social change. Redefining conventional notions of beauty in vocal performance and rejecting the social stigma of laryngectomy, Returning Sound presents an alternative—and truly modern—paradigm of music performance, informed by a fascinating nexus of new medical and art-technologies.


Presented by Research Centre for Creative Arts and Public Value (RCCAPV) of The Education University of Hong Kong


Performed by The Shout at Cancer Choir (UK) and The New Voice Club of Hong Kong (HK)


Sponsored by Atos Coloplast Group