Output details

Ochlophonic Study: Hong Kong

Drever’s term ‘ochlophonia’ refers to the crowded soundscape: densely populated, and involving the experience of being crowded and the auditory culture that it gives rise to.

The global metropolis of the Hong Kong SAR is one of the most densely populated and highly structured urban areas in the world. Propelled by laissez faire market capitalism, Hong Kong is comparatively de-industrialised, constituting the service and financial centre that links an ever expanding megaurban region, spreading around the Pearl River Delta and southern Chinese provincial capital of Guangzhou, to the international economy and society. As a result of this spatially restricted intensity, which includes the world's busiest container port, human activity is unremitting throughout the day – night offering only relative respite – with industrial noise forming a major predicament for the resident.

Through the editing, filtering, juxtaposition and superimposition of field recordings of urban ambiances and atmospheres collected between 1998 and 2008 – from the everyday and domestic to the auspicious such as Chinese New Year – Part I evokes the sheer intensity of incessant human activity, and provokes audio-phonic coping strategies from within this psychospatial crowded soundscape. The material and its delivery attempt to echo this densely populated region and the feeling of crowding is precipitates – ochlophonia. Its devising blurs the distinction between explicit composerly concerns with those of sociology, ethnography, and environmental psychology. This reflects Drever’s ongoing concern that soundscape composition should go beyond the ostensibly touristic, asserting that soundscape composition has a serious contribution to make in the field of sensory studies of the built environment.