Seminar on Soundscape as part of Sensory Heritage

Jointly organised with the Hong Kong Institute of Acoustics.

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 the sounds and the acoustic environment?

Prof. PerMagnus Lindborg will share an innovative multimodal research approach that takes sound and smell as core components of the immersive urban experience. The database generated from the soundscape project would serve further research in environmental psychology, multimodal perception, and sensory integration.

Tuesday 4 November 2025 , 6:45 pm – 8:15 pm; registration starts at 6:20 pm (1.5 CPD Hours) 

• Multimedia Theatre (M1060), Level 1, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, CityUHK.
• Free admission. 
• Priority to HKIOA Members, CityUHK Students and Staff.
• No advance booking required. Seating is limited on a first-come, first-served basis.
• For any queries, contact admin@hkioa.org. 

PerMagnus Lindborg 林博培, PhD, is a composer, sound artist, and researcher in soundscape perception, first author of 150+ outputs across publications, compositions, and media artworks. A Fellow with The Arctic Circle, SCM Team Research SoundLab, and TBA21 The Current, he is Principal Investigator for Multimodal Hong Kong (GRF 2023–). Commissions and selections include Asian Composers League (NZ 2022), ArtScience Museum (Singapore 2021), Osage (Hong Kong 2021), CubeFest (USA 2019), Berlin PianoPercussion (Germany 2018), Xuhui Museum (Shanghai 2017), Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens 2014), Moderna Museet (Stockholm 2008), and Centre Pompidou (Paris 2003). Awards include Best New Director (World Film Carnival, Cannes Short Film Festival, ISA Awards, 2020) and First Prize, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra (Norway 2002). Publications in Applied Acoustics, Frontiers, JAES, Leonardo, Organised Sound, PLoS One, and proceedings of ICMC, NIME, Inter‑Noise, SMC, Forum Acousticum. He is Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong, Scientific Committee member for Electroacoustic Music Network, and Vice‑President (Asia‑Oceania) for International Computer Music Association.