An audio walking map through Hanoi’s streets gives listeners a personal, sound drenched experience.
Words by Sadie Christie ● Photos by Linh Chi
The blue dot that is me moves through the trail of geometric shapes that appear on my Android as I enter Lý Thái Tổ Park. Soon the familiar sound of young children fill my ears; echoes of laughter and school rhymes. It’s hard to tell whether the voices come from the children playing nearby, or from within my headphones. The children’s voices ripple up and out of the soundscape, replaced by a child reciting in Danish, “Drømmer jeg, eller er jeg vaagen” – “Am I dreaming or am I awake?”.
So begins -if you choose to begin there- the ethereal immersion into the Hanoi Soundwalk, created by experimental musician Lương Huệ Trinh on Echoes, the brainchild app of Mathias Rossignol and Josh Kopeček.
A collaborative effort between artists from Copenhagen and Hanoi, Josh describes the Hanoi Soundwalk as a contextual sound installation – public art that feels its surroundings without the limitations of physically occupying public space. Instead, the composition is a layered network of sound fields created, recorded, or borrowed by Lương Huệ Trinh. The sounds have been gathered from her countless strolls on the same path, along with historical records, traditional Vietnamese music, and also from her Copenhagen collaborative counterpart Hans Sidow’s recordings, used for the Copenhagen Soundwalk. “I wanted to combine the real and the ambient, today and through history,” she says, “through that, the participant can open their minds to imagine a bigger space which is multicultural.”
“It creates this dialogue between you and the place and the sound. Then you sort of start telling your own stories in between.”
Though collaboration between Copenhagen and Hanoi may not seem obvious, it works surprisingly well within the walk, creating what Hans suitably refers to as a “sound bridge” between the two cities. In the Hanoi walk he notes that “some of the Danish melodies suddenly go into Vietnamese melodies, and it sounds like it’s almost the same tune. That’s interesting the way it comments on each of the cultures in the way it’s put together.”
The result is a non-linear, dynamic sensory experience. Trinh has composed and geographically placed the sounds: you create the composition as you choose which sound fields to walk through, and the environment creates yet more layers of sound and music, as it moves and changes around you. Sit, stand, walk—if you walk, walk slowly—absorb the soundtrack you’ve helped create just by being there. As Hans notes, “it creates this dialogue between you and the place and the sound. Then you sort of start telling your own stories in between.”
As I sit and listen, a saxophonist on a bench next to me begins playing. The music filters through my headphones, mingling with the sounds of running water and the haunting laments of traditional hát xẩm street music, where space and time converged in another beautiful afternoon in Hanoi.
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The Echoes app is available for free via their website. As it is still in its testing phase, the app currently only works for Android supported phones. The team are also looking for new projects — create your own soundmap by getting in touch.
