Background
Under the pandemic of covid-19, Hong Kong travel industry is diminishing. Based on research from HKTB, the number of tourists dropped over 96% from January of 2020 to July of 2022. Hong Kong government starts a series of policy to control the social distancing, like restrict the number of grouping people, the occupation of seat from restaurant etc. However, does those methods are a significant way to reduce the people hanging from streets? Assume that we can feel the environment by listen to the variety, noise and volume of the sound record. Let’s see the different of the environment before and during the pandemic.

About the project
By going to some selected places and recording location ambient sound. See if the ambient different from the time before the pandemic or not. Which can be a reference of the changes if the policy able to reduce gathering or the basic environment noises except people. See that if we can imagine the environment by listen to the location sound record only.

1. Airport
In my observation, the flow of people reduced obviously. When I was wandering in the terminal, I can hear high heels step on the floor, the reel rolling of suitcase, up and down of the escalator clearly. Compare with pervious clip from the internet, seldom do I hear people having conversation, so I claim that tourists were keep on shrinking.

2. Concert
In this record, I can feel the passion of the audience to the performer. They were shouting “encore” and clapping their hands, those sound have echoes since the venue quite big. There are plenty people attend to the concert, I don’t think that there is big difference after the counter-virus policy applied, the sound records can show the atmosphere of people enjoying the concert, keep on hailing and screaming.

3. Dai Pai Dong (restaurant)
In the record, there are background conversation from different table of costumer, by the loudness and the clear, you can identify there are different sound sources from position near to far. Also, in traditional culture, most of the tables are in circle form, by putting the recorder in the center, it can record in different direction. In this environment, we can hear sound like glass collided with chopsticks, pulling out the chairs etc. It stills no changes under pandemic, it sounds like usual if you just listen to the record.

Conclusion
By listen to record from different environment, there is no big change after the pandemic except the airport. You can imagine that you are living as usual when you listen to the records even the truth is that there are restrictions in our daily life. During the taste of the spital record, you can experience more that you may not easily recognize when you go there in person.