Nature buff’s passion project takes him to wide open spaces, recording sounds of Hong Kong
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Sounds of the city: a Hong Kong audio engineer’s eye-opening mission to capture moments of life
At a hiking trail by Kowloon Reservoir in Kam Shan Country Park, Andrew Kan Hei-chun faces off with a troop of monkeys.
The sound designer is not on a mission to trap or feed the rhesus macaques. Instead, he is trying to record their soft calls, as part of a project to create a “sound map” of Hong Kong.
“I’m worried the country parks might be destroyed at any point, either by hill fires or development. Nature could disappear anytime,” he said.
Kan, 26, a freelance sound designer and engineer working mainly on concerts and shows, spends his free time heading out to Hong Kong’s countryside.
After 2018’s Typhoon Mangkhut caused widespread devastation, uprooting trees in urban and rural areas, he decided to archive the city’s natural soundscape systematically.
He was also struck by the lack of recordings of Hong Kong’s forest sounds, that producers rely on to create soundtracks.