Passage is a practice-as-research project that will create an oral history archive and interactive soundwalk with a focus 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). The project is scheduled to launch in late 2025.
What will the recordings sound like?
Passage is part of a series of oral history and geolocation projects by composer George Tsz-Kwan Lam. Below are two examples from Lam’s 2022 project Family Association, which also combines interviews with the Chinese American community and an interactive soundwalk in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. Similar to Family Association, Passage is an audio-only project—there is no video recording involved.
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 will the oral history recordings focus on?
We are looking for individuals from Hong Kong’s minoritized communities to share their stories and reflections on the theme of movement: perhaps their thoughts on moving around the city in a typical day, moving 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 the freedom that they feel on a motorbike at night in the city.
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 can the HKBU Library help?
By the end of the project, we aim to create an archive of about 20 oral history recordings.
We would love to house the entire archive in HKBU’s Special Collections & Archives, so that the recordings are:
Searchable on HKBU OneSearch, JULAC, and WorldCat; and
Accessible by the public (ideally, we can make an excerpt accessible by the general public, and researchers can contact HKBU Special Collections & Archives to request full access);
Upon interviewees’ review of the recording and draft transcript, we will ask interviewees to consider signing a Deed of Gift and donate their oral history recording to HKBU Libraries.
How do we collect and process the recordings?
Once we connect with an interested interviewee, the research team will first schedule a pre-interview meeting to go over the project details, the interviewee consent form, and any questions that interviewees may have.
We will then send the consent form for the interviewee to review and sign. This form details the scope of the project and the interview. Interviewees will have a chance to review the transcript later in the process to determine whether and how they would like to donate their recordings to the project.
After the interview, our team will create a draft transcript of the conversation and send the recording and draft transcript for the interviewee to review. We will also ask for the interviewee’s permission to use their recording in the new music composition and to house their recording at the Hong Kong Baptist University Libraries for public access.
The public-facing oral history recording will be encoded with the OHMS standard, and our team will create dedicated webpages on HKBU’s servers that will be available for researchers and the public to access. Here is an example of what this might look like.
The team is also exploring the possibility of creating synchronized transcripts in both English and Chinese.
Screen capture of the syncrhonized and searchable transcript using the OHMS standard.
What’s the timeline?
Here is the overall timeline:
2024 Q1 and Q2: Create a project pilot with five interviewees, a prototype of the soundwalk app, and discuss longterm archival needs with HKBU Libraries
2024 Q3 and Q4: Launch interviews with around 15-20 interviewees, transcribe and process interviews, continue app development, and begin music composition.
2025 Q1 and Q2: Conclude interview processing, contract web designer to build templates for the online oral history archive, work with HKBU Libraries to transfer data to HKBU; finalize app development, record musical score.
2025 Q3 and Q4: Begin publicity for launch, including possible public programming in collaboration with HKBU and the Faculty of Arts; launch soundwalk and oral history archive toward the end of 2025.