Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk! The vendor’s cleaver struck the heavy wooden chopping board again and again after slicing through duck meat. Centimeters away, a microphone hovered, capturing each strike.
“To me, photography and sound recording are actually very similar. They're both ways of preserving memories, just through different senses… Whenever I listen to old recordings, it feels like I'm transported back to that exact moment. I'm there again, surrounded by the same atmosphere, reliving the experience,” explained Trần Đăng Khoa, the founder of Vietnam Sound Library, as we ate the duck soup he had just recorded being prepared.
Between noodle slurps, he expanded on his philosophy of audio preservation. Sounds can be a powerful means of eliciting memories and triggering nostalgia for moments we’d forgotten, but all too often, unlike photos, we don’t think to record something until it’s already gone.
Khoa, however, is always thinking about what to record and approaches every sound field trip systematically. When arriving at a location, he asks himself two questions: “First: What is the most distinctive quality of this sound? If someone closed their eyes and listened, would they immediately recognize where they are? Second: 30 or 50 years from now, when the world has changed, which sounds from today will still mean something to people?”
Khoa records Bình Tây Market's opening activities.
Saigoneer spent the morning witnessing Khoa’s approach in action, starting with when Chợ Lớn (Bình Tây Market) was just opening for the day, and a truck arrived at the front gate to unload. “This is significant — men at work,” he exclaimed before jolting off to get himself in position for the clanks and clamors of metal tables and stools being lugged down and set up. Minutes later, he was on the market’s second floor, asking a vendor to open and close her shopfront gate. Always listening for a sound to throw himself towards, Khoa even interrupted himself mid-sentence at breakfast to rush off to record a passing chè vendor.
A wellspring of energy, after the market, he brought us to several nearby pagodas where he recorded gieo quẻ xin xăm, a blind lottery vendor’s banter with visitors, bells being struck, and the ambient sounds of murmured prayers.
Sound has been central to Khoa since he was a child. “Every time I watched a movie and felt emotion, goosebumps, I realized mostly it came from sounds.” From there, the Saigon native took a logical route, studying sound engineering and finding work editing and mixing sound for films, TVCs, and other commercial projects. Occasionally, a scene would call for a specific ambiance or noise that wasn’t available in any archive. Sometimes, a Foley artist can create a sound that differs from reality but delivers a stronger emotional impact and enhances storytelling. But other times, there is no replacement for reality. In those situations, Khoa ventures off into the world to locate and capture it.
To organize and share these real sounds, in late 2024, Khoa created Vietnam Sound Library. At the time of writing, the archive contains more than 550 audio tracks assembled with a mission to make the everyday sounds of Vietnamese life available to everyone. Uploaded via SoundCloud, the lossless audio tracks are organized into clear albums such as parks, markets, residential areas, restaurants, the metro, and even festivals and activities, including a funeral. Within the folder are broad ambience and specific actions, such as a schoolyard’s morning drum, a street jackhammer, and people playing pickleball.
After our morning at the market and pagoda, we traveled to Khoa’s studio, where he sat in front of numerous monitors and a giant screen to edit what he’d recorded. He would review the recordings, isolate and remove distracting background elements, and cut out pauses before labeling and organizing them for upload. Likening the process to photo editing, he noted that every sound artist has their preferred level of manipulation, and it’s ultimately a matter of taste for how much polishing to apply.
To showcase how he uses the audio professionally, Khoa then pulled up an in-progress feature film for which he was completing the sound design. For a scene that takes place in a forest, he layered various sounds he’d recorded several weeks earlier in Cát Tiên National Park. Ambient noise, crickets, birds calling, a mosquito landing on the microphone, and other elements are layered atop one another to achieve not what a scene sounds like in reality but what listeners will imagine it to sound like.
While Khoa started Vietnam Sound Library for practical, professional use, the project took on new depth and significance when he met his partner, Đinh Vũ Thu Thủy. “At first, my goal was simply to build a sound library for film production. Then, in 2025, Thủy joined the project and brought me a completely different perspective on sound,” he shared.
It's rare to see either Thủy and Khoa without a smile.
Reflecting on the first time she joined him on a recording trip, Thủy said: “The first collection I worked on was recordings from traditional markets. That's when I realized that sound isn't just data — it tells cultural stories. Khoa felt the same way. Sounds like street vendors calling out to buy scrap metal, the school drum, or children playing năm mười were all part of our childhood growing up in the 1990s. But many of those sounds are gradually disappearing. That made us realize we should document everyday sounds while they're still here.”
The recording equipment is light and compact, so the couple is ready to go at almost any time.
Since then, Thủy has been by Khoa’s side on every trip, pointing out noises that might not be immediately relevant for films, but are important elements of Vietnamese culture that won’t be around forever. She also takes all the unique photos that accompany the tracks so people have a more exact understanding of what they are hearing, particularly if it's something they haven’t witnessed in person before. And in the studio, she is there to help clarify file names (“not sliding door, but rolling door”), and add essential cultural markers such as specific locations, dates, and times, beyond the generic notes that would be sufficient to satisfy the needs of filmmakers.
The project has changed Khoa and Thủy’s relationship with each other, as well as with sound itself. Thủy shared: “Before joining this project, I never paid much attention to sound. I took it for granted. I could hear, but I wasn't really listening. Now I've learned to slow down, to listen more carefully, and to notice the tiny sounds that I used to overlook. Through that, I've come to understand that sound carries much more than what we hear every day. It holds stories about culture, the environment, and people's memories. [Vietnam Sound Library] taught me to understand my surroundings through listening.”
In contrast, Khoa always appreciated sounds, but hadn’t before realized that his appreciation was a form of meditation: “One thing that really surprised me while recording was what happened when I gave my full attention to listening. I started feeling deeply connected to the present moment. Everything around me suddenly became much more vivid. That's when I realized that, before this, I had spent so much time lost in my own thoughts that I wasn't truly present in everyday life.”
The genuine appreciation the couple has for sound recording allows them to work without annoying their subjects. Combined with a palpable sense of joy and excitement, this authenticity removes skepticism and puts the people populating streets, markets, schoolyards, and restaurants at ease. This is particularly important because while many sounds may be of natural or manmade objects, Thủy considers the presence of voices to be among the most important ones for culture. The street vendor calls, which Khoa likens to singing, are her favorite: “After hearing just a few voices, you can immediately feel the unique atmosphere of a Vietnamese market. Every vendor has their own style, their own rhythm, and their own voice, and together they become part of the market's identity.”
When was the last time you heard the call of a local rat trap vendor? An ice cream cart? What about a mobile laminator or someone offering to weigh your child on a scale? While discussing vendor songs, we soon found ourselves talking about lost sounds. With Khoa and Thủy, it’s easy to become philosophical and ruminate on the value of sounds, our favorite sounds, the sounds we wish we’d heard before they’d vanished, and what is disappearing all around us. What did Saigon sound like when horses still clomped down the streets pulling carts, and before plastic replaced vendor tables and chairs? “I wish I could record traditional Vietnamese children's games,” Khoa noted before offering the observation that “every generation has their own sound, for example, when elders come together and talk nowadays, they talk differently than elders 30 years ago; the way they talk, the topics they talk about, even their volume.”
In addition to archival value, these sounds of the past can have a powerful impact on the present. Khoa explained: “One day, we received a message that said, ‘I'm studying abroad, and I really miss these sounds. Thanks, bro.’ It was incredibly moving because that was the moment we realized these recordings aren't just preserving sounds. They're also helping people reconnect with their own memories and emotions.”
Regardless of their use, one unavoidable truth of the sound library is that Khoa and Thủy cannot do it all. Even if one discounts sounds vanishing every day, Saigon simply contains too many noises for one couple to capture. And then one has to consider other locations, with Khoa noting “one man is never enough because its not about technique, it's about experience. People born in the north will understand the north, people born in the seaside or the mountains will understand their homeland better than me; they know what to record better than me.”
At the moment, Khoa and Thủy are not focusing on the marketing and branding that would help raise more awareness and attract additional archivists, let alone thinking of any way to monetize the library. Rather, they seem content to chase after important sounds and ensure they are preserved. If this means a homesick Saigoneer can connect with their childhood, or a film can contain a bit more reality, that's all the better. And in the process, we can all hope they remember to record themselves the soft laughter and exultations that accompany their process — that, too, is now an important part of Saigon’s auditory history.
