Museums as sites for displaying sound materials: a five-use framework

ABSTRACT

The ways in which sound materials have been deployed in museum exhibitions and the listening practices that have resulted from them are diverse. They have long been driven by a complex interplay of circumstances. These circumstances include the underlying epistemological order and its conceptual constructs, the wider social and cultural orders in which these are enmeshed, existing and emerging technological devices and situational and specific museum practices and their management options. This article proposes a typology of five constructs to describe how sound materials have been considered by museums in conceptual terms through time and to map exhibition practices stemming from them. In greater detail, I argue that such practices tend to cluster into five categories: sound as lecturing, sound as ambiance/soundtrack, sound as artefact, sound as art, and sound as crowd curation. My work draws on two types of data: insights from academic literature and my own observations.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound
• museums
• sound studies

Notes

1. My use of the terms sound and music requires some clarification. In short, sound refers to virtually all sound phenomena resulting from sound waves audible to humans resulting from a material vibration recorded or otherwise. Music, in turn, refers specifically to all human practices commonly called music, which stem from an intention to produce music. When deploying the term sound in the context of discussing sound-based multimodal museum practices or museums in general, I am referring to both sound and music according to the aforementioned definitions.

2. Svetlana Alpers (1991) also expands on the notion of “the museum as a way of seeing”. In his book The Object Stares Back (1996), James Elkins charted a multiplicity of “ways of seeing” in museums.

3. Visual practices were considered by Duncan Cameron to have reached their heyday during the time of the “temple museum” in the nineteenth century (Karp, Lavine, and Foundation, 1991). In conceptual terms, the “temple museum” means the museum characteristics of the late nineteenth century, but which are still in existence, combining the roles of promoter of nationalisms, repository of colonial appropriation and the guardian and classifier of great traditional treasures.

4. An understanding that is shared by Tony Bennett (1995, 59-69, 2011).

5. At the heart of these is the understanding that, in being mediated by language, knowledge is not fixed but arbitrary and flexible (Derrida [1997] 1974) which has come to relativise museum curatorial discourses thereby broadening the scope of the themes addressed; in short, oriented to creating unexpected representational possibilities (Moore 1997).

6. Alongside this, research proving that people learn primarily by experiencing and that processes underlying meaning-making and engagement are made up of integrating prior knowledge, experiences, memories, choice-control (Falk 2006, 155; Falk and Storksdieck 2005; Falk 2009; Falk, Dierking, and Adams 2011; Macdonald 2013), emotion and a sense of nostalgia (Leonard and Knifton 2015, 161) has provided the substrate for museum practices to shift and to embrace a commitment to deliver more engaging and inclusive exhibitions (Basu and Macdonald 2007; Roppola [2014] 2012; Vermeeren et al. 2018).

7. Term coined by David Howes (2005) to suggest a “sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment” (p.7).

8. A term designating combinations of modes such as image, writing, music, speech and so forth, with meanings distributed across modes.

9. According to Shepherd and Wicke (1997), “A gaze can be controlled more easily than hearing, and in this sense the world of vision becomes safer and more permanent than the word of sound” (p.127).

10. Mansell (2017) furthermore expounds about the auditory chaos of this period to originated sound abatement campaigns and correspondingly for sound to be generally undesirable. The Anti-Noise League was formed in London in 1933 and staged an exhibition, titled Noise Abatement, at the Science Museum in 1935 with the objective to draw the government and the population in general to noise nuisance problems. Neurasthenia, a psychiatric disorder more or less discarded today affecting the cultivated classes, comes from this period (Mansell, 2017). Smith (2012) has mobilised the words “loudest, roar, and buzz” to deploy how people generally described the industrialisation processes in the United States (p.39). Industrial noise was furthermore closely related to a decrease in the quality of health (Bijsterveld 2012), even though symptoms could not be visually demonstrated. The idea was very prevalent that “[…] even if you couldn’t see it, noise was acting in the background to drain your nervous energy” (Mansell, 2017).

11. Sterne (2003), nonetheless, posits that rather than creating new modes of listening, audio technologies have come to enlarge and disseminate previously confined ones (p.154).

12. While proposing this four-construct framework, I am aware that in practice its boundaries are not always as clear-cut as in theory.

13. This assumption moreover entwines the behaviourist-positivist learning model described by Falk, Dierking, and Adams (2011, 325).

14. It comprises four main families: idiophones, aerophones, chordophones, and membranophones. More recently, in 1940, a new category was added by Sachs, that of electrophones.

15. Griffiths [2013] 2008) nonetheless also signposts events in which music was deployed in museums in the early 20^th century for relaxation purposes which represent the true precursors of the shift from occularcentric practices to more multimodal, sensorial and enveloping ones as we now find on contemporary museum agendas (p. 242). I have found no actual evidence of applying these technologies in the service of exhibiting musical artefacts, which does not, however, mean that this did not occur.

16. Particularly heavy in its earliest form. This first device weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds before assuming a more portable format following the emergence of audiocassettes in the 1960s (Fisher 2004, 50).

17. For Susan Pearce [2006] 1994, 9) an artefact is a term that can be used in the same way as an object or thing; in fact, “[…] these three words are best employed without any particular distinctions being made between them […]”. Sound as artefact is here applied distinct from the common understanding i.e. meaning an accidental or unwanted sonic material resulting from the manipulation of sound.

18. Term coined by James Gibson in 1966.

19. Original term coined by Murray Schafer to designate the soundmarkers identifying a specific community or culture.

20. The British Library owns an extensive collection of 6.5 million unique sound recordings from all over the world. The collection covers the entire range of recorded sound from the 1880s to the present day. These recordings are arranged into nine collections: accents and dialects; arts, literature, and performance; classical music; environment and nature; popular music; oral history; radio and sound recording history; world and traditional music and sound maps.

21. Brown, Gjestland, and Dubois (2017, 7) moreover note authors to not have a universal agreement as regards soundscape to be a human perceptual construct of a given acoustic environment.

22. This term has emerged from discussions with Stefania Zardini Lacedelli and John Kannenberg in the scope of the preparation of the conference Sound in Museums to be held in 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [SFRH/BD/115789/2016]. Financial Support from FCT and FSE within the framework Portugal 2020—2014-2020.

Notes on contributors

Alcina Cortez

Alcina Cortez (INET-MD, Instituto de Etnomusicologia, Música e Dança, Lisbon). A museum professional since 1996, she has served in Expo’98 and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. She holds a BSc in Musicology (1992), post-graduates in Popular Music Studies (2011) and Acoustics and Sound Studies (2019), MSc in Ethnomusicology/Museology (2014), and is currently concluding her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Museology under the supervision of Salwa Castelo-Branco, NOVA, University of Lisbon, and Noel Lobley, Virginia University. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, which entails Sound Studies, Ethnomusicology Museum Studies and Social Semiotics, she has been examining the narrative and affective opportunities opened by sound and music as materials for building museum exhibitions.