We’re looking for individuals to contribute their voices to a new interactive soundwalk and oral history archive focusing on Hong Kong’s minoritized communities.
About Passage
Passage is a new site-specific, immersive listening soundwalk that combines voices from Hong Kong’s minoritized communities, music inspired by the recorded speech, and geolocation technology. The two-year project is supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong. The project is led by Emily Shun-Man Chow-Quesada (assistant professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University) and George Tsz-Kwan Lam (composer, assistant director, Nevada Humanities, USA). The project is scheduled to launch in late 2025.
What will it sound like?
Passage is part of a series of oral history and geolocation projects by composer George Tsz-Kwan Lam. Here’s an example from Lam’s 2022 project Family Association, which combines interviews with the Chinese American community and an interactive soundwalk in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. Here are two excerpts from this piece:
What is a “soundwalk”?
Great question! A soundwalk invites the listener to take a walk—perhaps to a new nature trail or around the block in your usual commute—and specifically focus on the sounds that you hear. It’s a great way to discover your surroundings from an aural perspective. Our project is an interactive soundwalk, where the listener uses a geolocation-enabled app on their phone with their walk. Depending on their location, they will hear oral history recordings, music inspired by the recorded speech, or a combination of both. In addition, to reach an even broader audience in Hong Kong, we also plan to translate interviews into Chinese, and the listener can choose to read the translations on their smartphone or listen to the interviews in Chinese.
Take a look at an example of a soundwalk below, also excerpted from George Tsz-Kwan Lam’s Family Association:
What would you like to know from me?
We are looking for individuals from Hong Kong’s minoritized communities to share their stories and reflections on the theme of movement: perhaps your thoughts on moving around the city in a typical day, moving your home from one location to another, the challenges and joys of taking public transportation, helping an elder family member or friend move about their home—or something else! We are collecting oral history recordings from the community; there is no video recording involved.
Here are a few example questions, although this list is certainly not exhaustive. We look forward to exploring your stories with you in our interview.
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Tell me about how you move around the city.
Tell me about your typical day off. Where do you go? How do you get there?
Tell me about how you traveled here today.
Tell me about your favorite walking path in the city.
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Which modes of transportation do you use the most?
How would you describe the Hong Kong passing you by as you take the MTR? Taxi? Ferry?
Tell me about the longest journey that you took in Hong Kong using public transportation.
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Who do you travel with the most?
Recall a time when you helped someone move from one place to another. Tell me about the challenges and rewards of that experience.
How do you move within your community?
Who do you go see most often? How do you get there and back?
Where do you like to go with a friend?
How will you use my voice?
After the audio recording session, our team will transcribe your interview and provide you with a copy of the audio and transcript to review. Once we receive your approval, we will add your interview to a new online archive of oral history interviews from this project that will be donated to the collections at the Hong Kong Baptist University Libraries and made accessible to the public. If you would like, you can also anonymously contribute your interview to the project. In addition, the team will process your interview and may include your voice as part of the new musical composition.
I’m interested. What’s next?
Thank you for your interest! We will reach out and let’s find a time to chat more.