Bitter Home Sweet Home

The main objective of my project was to use sound as a medium to fully portray the lives of the homeless residing in Tung Chau Street Park. I got my inspiration from Peter Cusack’s Sounds from Dangerous Places, as the idea of enabling a person to fully experience a geographical location such as Chernobyl through sound intrigued me. The reason why I specifically chose Tung Chau Street Park was due to its peculiar traits: vital signs of life in a lonely street park during midnights. Within the park, there is a whole community of homeless people that live all together. The community has been expanding at an exponential rate since the pandemic, due to losses of jobs and income cuts compared to soaring rents. (Zhang) As a result, the Tung Chau Street Park is comprised of makeshift houses made with cardboard boxes along with homeless people sleeping, gambling, drinking, and consuming drugs. This explains why the park is packed with multiple sounds even during midnight.  

I aimed to record these raw conditions within the park by using Zoom H3 in ambisonics format while listening with my headphone. To further reduce other sounds such as cars or birds chirping, I visited the park around 11 PM. I slowly strolled through the park holding my recorder to capture diverse sounds from different angles. I purposely chose to move around instead of staying in one specific location within the park, as I wanted the listener to achieve the experience of soundwalk, a form of walking with focusing on listening to the environment. To enhance this experience, I rendered my ambisonics recording into both binaural and stereo using the decoder in Reaper and combined with set of images to produce a video. As a result, one could listen to numerous sounds like people talking, footsteps, or leaves bustling to the wind from different directions, when listening through a headphone or two speakers. 

What makes my project so interesting, is the coexistence of silence and liveliness. Previously mentioned, there is a vast number of people residing in Tung Chau Street Park. As there are homeless people enjoying their time drinking and playing games, there are also people sleeping. This explains the silence in some parts of my recording; people were sleeping in some areas within the park. I believe that this charming contrast within the Tung Chau Street Park makes my project especially more unique. The project itself is very significant, as I was able to vividly depict Tung Chau Street Park through my recordings. As covered in class, mainstream news on the internet is incapable of fully portraying the event, as they are presented in a third-person manner. However, for ambisonics recordings, a person could indulge himself/herself to the actual situation by listening to surround sounds from diverse angles. I was able to physically learn the importance and beauty of soundscape recording, and I will use this experience to further progress for my final project.