MMHK

Multimodal Hong Kong :: Documenting Sensory Cultural Heritage through Soundscape and Smellscape.

The sensory cultural heritage, combining tangible and intangible heritage, creates identity and cohesion in a community. In urban research, analysis of everyday-ish and informal customs typically rely on visual images, texts, and archival materials, to describe the multifarious aspects of culturally significant places and practices. By contrast, the acoustic environment is often not part of the narrative, and very rarely is the olfactory environment recorded. Given the contemporary context of rapid and profound transformation in Hong Kong, essential threads of the city fabric risk being neglected, and might even disappear before they can be documented. Can we really claim to know urban places without thoroughly considering, and documenting, the sensory cultural heritage represented by sounds and smells?