TaiwanSounds
A small web soundboard that captures the everyday audio texture of Taipei and turns it into a shareable ambient experience.
Project brief
Why I started
I wanted to reconnect with building, ship something real again, and preserve the specific feeling of being in Taiwan through sound.
Timeline
The project moved from a long-running idea into a finished launch during a Taiwan trip in November 2025, after a stretch of city walks, field recordings, and a focused build sprint.
What I learned
Shipping something personal broke creative inertia, and working from a strong emotional anchor made the product easier to scope, finish, and publish.
Experiment notes
TaiwanSounds started as a simple question: how do you preserve the feeling of a place when you are no longer there?
For me, one of the strongest parts of Taiwan is not just the food, architecture, or pace of life. It is the soundscape. MRT announcements, temple ambience, street noise, scooters, storefront chimes, and the constant background hum all create a kind of atmosphere that stays with you.
I wanted to build something small but alive:
- a collection of recordings from daily life in Taipei
- an interface that made those sounds easy to explore
- a project I could actually finish and release
The recording process was intentionally low-friction. I walked around the city with my phone, used voice memos, and captured moments as they happened instead of overproducing them.
That constraint ended up shaping the product. TaiwanSounds feels closer to a field-note archive than a polished media platform, and that is part of what makes it work.
The deeper value of the experiment was not just the finished website. It was what the launch represented:
- a return to making things
- proof that small creative projects can still matter
- momentum from publishing instead of endlessly planning
I am still interested in where the project could go next, but the first win was simply getting it into the world.