Social MP3 experiment draws 1,000 to Sentosa
Close to a 1,000 people turned for a social experiment at Resorts World Sentosa on Saturday evening.
Organised by social collective The Hidden Good and supported by the Singapore Kindness Movement, the experiment involved random strangers turning up at a pre-determined public location and time, downloading an MP3 file and follow the instructions delivered to their headphones via a narrator called “Ah Meng”.
In the six-minute video above, mainly teens and young adults congregate at two RWS locations, the Waterfront and behind the Lake of Dreams, armed with their plugged-in smartphones. They then download an MP3 file and press play at the agreed time of 6pm.
The result? Fun, crazy scenes and laughter as the participants mix with an unsuspecting public, who are trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
The video, uploaded on Saturday evening, has since been viewed over 12,000 times, and has generally been positively received.
The idea, which was started by prank collective ImprovEverywhere in the US in 2004, has since toured Berlin, Germany and Adelaide, Australia and several college campuses in the United States.
In Singapore, the Hidden Good said the experiment helped participants break barriers and redefine society.
"Singapore, this is what a warmer, friendlier society could look like," it said on its Facebook page, which has over 2,500 likes.
The Hidden Good, which describes its mission as celebrating "a vibrant and positive culture amongst Singaporeans", aims to seek out, acknowledge and appreciate good deeds performed by ordinary people that would otherwise go unnoticed.
By doing this, it said it wanted to challenge the "existing misguided pre-conceived notion of an unfriendly, selfish society, where every man functions for himself".