Hong Kong Music Atlas

By Yanbing Chen & Qianheng Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This interactive map visualizes the emotional geography of Hong Kong through Cantonese pop lyrics that reference specific places across the city. Users can click on mapped locations to read lyrical excerpts and instantly access the corresponding songs on YouTube, transforming the city into a lyrical interface. The project invites users to explore how music encodes place-based memory, identity, and emotional attachment—a cartographic expression of “topophilia”.

Lyrics were manually curated from a corpus of iconic songs, geocoded, and embedded into a web map interface. Built using web mapping tools and custom symbology, the design incorporates dual-language labels and minimalist styling to support both exploration and storytelling. This interface centers user interaction—turning each map click into a musical journey through Hong Kong’s collective soundscape.