"McSoundscape" : A Soundscape Project to Represent The Spatial Identity of McDonald Restaurants In Hong Kong

The word “McSoundscape” refers to the Soundscape recorded from the interior space of McDonald restaurants in Hong Kong. Soundscape is the major medium of research and creation in this project, which allows audience to investigate the details of the surrounding environment, the actual activities, and all aspects of lived experience in our city space while making them a journey to the space of McDonalds.

Through Soundscape, our audience can explore the space for themselves by an acoustic approach, get a realization that is detached away from the routine life in reality, and examine how the users of Hong Kong McDonalds have actively performed their sense of locality through some creative tactics. The goal is to demonstrate how the commonly practiced appropriation of space, as a visual spectacle in Hong Kong, could re-articulate and govern the changing identities, characteristics and meanings of our social space temporarily and transitorily.

Research materials and sound data from McDonalds have been re-structured and visualized in the form of Information Design. Graphical representation of the data in those interface designs may allow us to discover any patterns or correlations between those different activities, which could otherwise be hidden or neglected in the forms of real-life photo, video or text.

Digital media offers us the chance to visit a particular space/site and to run through the space without physically being there. The technology helps to express and re-present the space of McDonalds in Hong Kong and further connect such space virtually with anybody from the world through the World
Wide Web.

“McSoundscape” has been selected to exhibit in Japan during the recent Dislocate 08 Exhibition in Yokohama, Japan on September, 2008. http://www.dis-locate.net