The concept for this project was to study one of the most interesting phenomenon in Hong Kong,
the act of ‘Villian Hitting’ under the Canal Road Flyover in the Wan Chai district. Our intention was
to give the best representation of what it feels like to be there in person, paying attention to each
individual sound element in the environment, how people behave and a closer look at the
traditions and rituals performed by the lovely ladies who make a living with this work.
The Chinese custom, also known as Da Siu Yan in Cantonese, is an old ritual generally practised
in Hong Kong and the Guangdong area, believed to originally come from ancient agricultural
traditions, where the villagers used to hold annual ceremonies to scare away the ‘White
Tiger’ (wild animals) who would harm the village and destroy farmers’ crops. The ‘White Tiger’
notion eventually changed into a more general idea of a ‘villain’. The Chinese custom involves
paying one of the spiritual leaders (villain hitters) to strike a piece of paper bearing someone’s
name or photo to repel bad spirits and negative energy, pushing off bad luck and inviting good
fortune.
In order to capture the best soundscape representation of this interesting event, we planned our
recording strategy in a way that no sounds would be excluded. Using the Zoom H3-VR, we
recorded the ambience in AmbiX format; in addition, individual sounds and parts of conversations
were recorded with a Zoom H4 recorder, using the recorder’s own stereo mics (with the fluffy
windshield), as well as a Sennheiser MKH416 Gun mic (with the hard windshield) to capture a
better quality for individual sounds in the chaotic environment of the location.
We filmed parts of the recording process and split the post-production work between both of us,
one focusing on the ambience and the other on the individual stereo and mono recordings. We
later combined all recordings on Reaper, encoding the stereo/mono files with StereoEncoder, and
rendered the file into Binaural and Ambisonics B-Format.
Reference List
Album/Photos Digitisation Service | Capture HK. (n.d.). https://www.capture.hk/en/blog/
nostalgia-3/hong-kong-stress-reliever-villain-hitting-19-24