The idea of this project is to the remembrance of childhood through sound. The is inspired by Sound Diaries, is to record everyday sound, from parties to housework, driving to gardening. This project is to record the everyday sound of Hong Kong that we are used to live in, sometimes even omitting it. We use sound as media to enable the act of remembrance.

Significance of our project/ chosen topic

The purpose of our project is to use ambisonic sound to portray what we think is our childhood. The majority of us did not have the time nor the space to remember or organise what our childhood represented, and how it affected us today. It is common however that when we were children, we were not the happiest kids, we wanted to be independent, grow up, and taste the sense of freedom that we dreamt of. This project allows us to see our childhood through sound but in the present perspective, how would we feel when we listen to our sound. Charlie Chaplin once said ‘Life Is Tragedy In Close-up, But Comedy In Long-shot’. Seeing the past, the sense of regret, bitterness, and jealousy in our childhood, will it transform into joy, envy, and even touching. We are hoping to deliver an individual emotion to the audience.

Process of creating our project

Before recording for our project, we first decided on a list of different things or locations we thought were related to our childhood memories in Hong Kong or growing up and made a list of these things and places. The things and places we decided to record include, the Mr. Softee ice cream truck, chestnut vendors, children playing, swings in a playground, bird sounds etc.

And as for equipment used, a Zoom H3-VR recorder in AmbiX mode was used. In the process of recording for our project, we encountered a few problems. We started off in Kowloon Tong in an attempt to record sounds of a school bell from nearby primary and secondary schools, however none of the schools had a bell that day, so instead we included a recording of a distant “times up” bell from the tennis court in Shek Kip Mei park. Besides this, we also wanted to record sounds of children playing but there were no children at the park at the time so we tried going to a different location. This location ended up being at a balcony in K11 in Tsim Sha Tsui. Overall I would say most of the problems we encountered during the recording process had to do with us not being able to find our desired sound source and having to find and decide on a new sound source at the last minute. Nonetheless, I feel we were able to deal with these issues and carry on.

In terms of workload division, I think we did a decent job at splitting everything 50/50 as after brainstorming and coming up with the idea, we did all the recordings and editing of the final project together. Additionally, the writing of this commentary was also split between us.