Celine:
Thank you all for your speeches. It’s really inspiring to see all these unconventional approaches to document and understand our city rather than merely plans or sections. Still I have two more questions for Verdi and Obed.
First one is about the symbols you adapted to visualize different sounds. I know it’s not easy to abstract something that is already intangible like the sounds. So can you elaborate more on the logic behind your system of these symbols?
Second one is following the previous question for you. You have mentioned that the translation between sounds and space is actually closely related to people’s experience in that space. However, at the start of your video you have documented a song 愛如潮水 which could be exotic to some audience. So do you think these exotic clips still have the potential to visualize a space for everyone?
Obed:
About the first part of the question, we actually took references of how actually a musical note works. We translate different aspects of music notes into how we can use it to describe a space. But then in different aspect we add what we think is more suitable or how it could facilitate our way of representing both like sound character of the time when some events happened or how the sound quality changes in relation to the quality of a space such as the sound played in an enclosed space is quite different from that in an open space. These are like different natures or characters of space that we extracted through our semester-long project. Because actually you can see we did the same exercise over and over at first, just some written description of the sound, and the second time a dot with different colors. Every time we try to make it more complex in how we understand a sound is not just a point or something that is very general. I think this is what we try to do across the semester.
For the second part of the question, I think for the exotic sound, what we see is like when you put on your headphone and you play your music aloud, you are kind of shutting yourself off from the surroundings and it’s kind of like a personal space in your own perception because no one can actually listen to what you are listening. But you are also physically in a public space. That is kind of the dynamics we want to show through the video. Maybe when you draw a plan you are wearing a headphone, it’s just a thinker among a lot of people in a space. It wouldn’t tell what he/she is experiencing about the space.
Verdi:
I think for the music part it’s quite interesting that you ask. Because actually at the later part of the project, we also have that music coming back from a busker. So we are trying to say that when your put own your headphone you are kind of like creating your personal space that the guy next to you without headphone would not have perceived. And for the busker he is like creating a new space around him as long as people could hear – that’s just because he is playing music. So the space we are trying to describe is a kind of perceptive space, which is quite personal in my opinion and not about the conventional way like from a bird eye view that architecture usually looks that.
Interviewer: XU Ben Celine 3035329742
Interviewee: Obed Cheung & Verdi Tsui