How Do We Listen To Museums?

Abstract

This special issue explores how museums are experimenting with sonic experience to enhance the interpretation of and engagement with objects, to advance emotional responses, to balance stimulation and reflection, and better understand the place of sound in a multi-sensory environment. Sound can contribute to museums in various ways: as a museum object, an interpretation tool, a visitor engagement device, architectural revelation, creative opportunity for artists, and as a conceptual model outlining our relation to the world. How is sound implicated in visitor’s understanding of themselves and their relationship to history and culture? How can sound affirm, comfort, and challenge? Museums are generally assumed to be exclusively vision-oriented. But since the emergence of the first public and private collections in Europe, sound culture has followed, mirrored, and challenged the values and goals of museums. The presence and absence of sound has been integral to the shifting concepts of how museum users –be they visitors, researchers, or staff – experience such venue. Sound’s use has morphed over time alongside the changing objectives and values of museum institutions. It is worth a momentary glance into history to see that sound culture has been part of the museum story since the idea of the museum was conceived. Renaissance- and Enlightenment-era collecting formed, and often still informs, the content and experience of museums in the present. Both eras demonstrated a fascination with tangible and intangible sound culture through live music or musical instruments. Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), a trend-setting Renaissance noble woman living in the Italian city of Mantua, created her own studiolo rooms in which to display a collection of jeweled objects, paintings, sculpture, and musical instruments (see “About IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive”; Prizer). The visual experience of those rooms celebrated music culture: detailed intarsia of the wall-to-wall collection storage cabinets and decorated ceiling include musical notation as well as images of popular instruments of Isabella’s time. For Renaissance families on the Italian Peninsula, private art and artifact collections demonstrated affluence and power, by using patronage and conspicuous consumption to assert and demonstrate power (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Much in the same way as early museums imagined themselves as serving a privileged segment of society, Isabella D’Este’s private studiolo welcomed only selective gatherings of cultural and social elite (Campbell 2004). Later on, sound culture became part of the Enlightenment agenda to collect, categorize, and display human and natural heritage (broadly defined); these agendas traced the root motivations of the late 20th century public museum in Europe (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). An early example is Irish physician and collector Hans Sloane (1660–1753), who amassed the artifact collection that became the foundational content for several institutions (including the British Museum). Sloane counted music culture amongst his tangential curiosities. This interest was evidenced by his inclusion of instruments and songs of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean in his 1707 compendium Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (see and Sloane 1707). One drum acquired by Sloane still lives in the collection of the British Museum (museum number SLMisc.1368). From a critical perspective, Sloane’s methodology (and, arguably, the resulting museum experience) reflected the values and motivations of the colonizing agenda: to accumulate knowledge through the labour of subjugated people, and to share that knowledge through public shows of symbolic power (see Delbourgo 2017) – a legacy with which many institutions still grapple. The 19th century museum model gradually endorsed a highly devotional and quasireligious relation to its artifacts, privileging the sense of view and thereby installing the need for quietness. Visitors were required to speak softly, and children should stay quiet to prevent disturbing the exclusivity of the visually focused enjoyment of the artwork. Even the 20th century “White Cube,” that emerged as the normative model for many modern and contemporary art museums, seems exclusively geared toward the visual, while its generally reverberant spaces neglect visitors’ acoustic wellbeing or experience. We now know that the “silent museum” does not exist. As public spaces, museums are by essence “noisy.” Moreover, throughout the 20th century, avant-garde gallery artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, Bruce Nauman, Christian Marclay, Christina Kubisch or Janet Cardiff, to name just a few, have included sound as a way of broadening their expressive skills and needs, taking into account and even pushing the use of the spectacular technological evolution of their time. At nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, almost every survey of contemporary art features sonic or audio-visual works. Similarly, in those two decades, attention to museum visitors and the express interest in providing access accommodations has led institutions to broaden the scope of experiences on offer and explore a diversity of engagement protocols with their objects. Conversations on sound in museums have developed in multiple directions; a departure from the early parochial impulses to “civilize” museum users or support strategic social and political identities. Many museums in our current era strive to provide a “menu” of experiences within and outside their walls from which visitors may self-select: experiences that combine the sensory, cognitive, emotional, and intellectual. In current museum practice, professionals frequently invoke the terms “multi-sensory” and “immersive” to recognize the role of both concepts in translating museum knowledge and creating emotional, memorable experiences. These approaches are experimenting with how to create multi-dimensional encounters that will resonate with diverse user needs, abilities, and desires. At this writing, with a few exceptions (Angliss 2005; Bubaris 2014; Cox 2015; de Visscher 2018) the concept of sound in museums has often been discussed though literature in case studies or thought pieces, often within editions that bring all senses into conversation (Binter 2014; Levent and Pascual-Leone 2014; Monti and Keene 2016) or that address one node of museum practice such as curatorial, design or specific musical genres (Baker, Istvandity and Nowak 2016; Celant 2014; Kelly 2017; Leonard 2018; Wiens 2015; Zisiou 2011). In some cases, such as Constance Classen’s 2017 promisingly titled The Museum of the Senses (see Shih book review in this issue), sound is altogether dismissed, with exclusive accents placed on other non-visual senses such as touch or smell. These investigations tend to focus on sound as one amongst a range of sensory experiences in museum life, or as art pieces and sound installations. These perspectives would now need to be included into a larger discussion which could benefit from broader types of museums with varied kinds of sound experiences. Similarly, from an academic perspective concentrating on the aural dimension, to date, there has been little research on sound in museums: musicology and sociology have rarely studied specific areas of music reception such as museums, despite a relatively constant presence of concerts and other events in many institutions, whether in specific auditoriums or in their galleries. The rise in the twenty-first century of sound studies, the scholarly exploration of how we relate to our environment through the sense of hearing –makes no distinction between music, sound, noise or even silence ! – has very rarely addressed the sonic dimension of museums (notable exceptions include Bijsterveld 2015; Schulze 2013; Toop 2010; Voegelin 2014) – another gap which we hope to fill through the publication of this special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal. “When people enter a museum, they don’t want to step out of their lives; they want to get closer to them,” writes Chris Dercon, former director of Tate Modern (see Bechtler and Imhof 2014). Museum practice is shifting and changing to accommodate individuals and communities who have a variety of communication needs and learning styles. Since humans live in an increasingly sound-oriented world, thanks to the ever growing presence of portable digital means, sound is a vital part of these shifts. Whether an individual possesses full, partial, or no audiological capacity, experiences with sound inform senses of place, feelings of belonging or exclusion, and memories and aspirations. Technological evolution has allowed us to communicate through sound or turn to it in order to help us make sense of our experiences. Even people with little or no hearing capacity must navigate a hearing-centric world, such as witnessed by the work of deaf artist . And the pervasive contemporary web-based technology that provides sound and music through shared playlists and podcasts for instance, encourages each listener to be the curator of their own soundworld. It would seem at this writing that museum professionals are now being called upon to integrate this new environment and its renewed engagement with the outside world, where conversations about sound (or its absence) inform content development, visitor’s experiences, and one’s every-day activities. As guest editors of this issue, we felt the time was right to draw attention to the importance of sound in museums through emerging research and theory. Our aim is not to divorce the topic from conversations on other senses (which are deeply intertwined in practice), but to spotlight its particularity. In order to do so, we brought together perspectives of artists, audio specialists, curators, educators, designers, storytellers, critics, and philosophers. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that such a wide range of perspectives has been collected into one resource on this particular topic. The range of contributions reflects the perspectives of both museology and museography – the theory and the practice of museums –, as well as sound studies and art practice, through which we hope to open a window into contemporary thought but also provide a resource for on-the-ground professionals. This richness of perspectives helps address pitfalls often embedded within museum operations or content production processes: the tendency towards isolating roles or objectives, and a lack of conversation between professionals who really should be talking to one another throughout conceptual, development, and execution stages of any small or large project. This special issue offers an opportunity for many perspectives to enter into conversation with one another. Museum professionals often risk entrenching ourselves within our specific roles or areas of interest, yet the work demands a holistic approach to best practices that incorporates multiple perspectives. Visitors never encounter the work of curators, exhibition designers, building architects, and acoustic engineers in isolation. Despite that museum work being deeply multi-disciplinary, it is a constant challenge to engage with new perspectives shared by people with vastly different roles, interests, or expertise from our own, especially when our efforts often fall into wellentrenched divisions: archives, history-inclined musical instrument museums, digital experiences, genre-based music museums (such as classical, rock, or popular “hall of fame-” style), and contemporary art/sound installations or galleries. These museum types are often perceived as sharing different spaces, approaches, or aims, and therefore our operations and conversations occur separately. Our contributors share research and data-driven expertise on how and why sound can both augment experience, and illuminate visitors’ understanding of ideas, icons, or moment in history. Musical instruments and other sound-making objects are approached from a multitude of directions: as tools of learning, as performative signifiers, and as receptacles and conduits for emotion and nostalgia. Several contributions provide guidance for including sound amongst the many elements of museum experience, but also challenge the ability-centric heritage that still underpins both content development and visitor experience. We have looked at a variety of museum experiences, from large blockbuster exhibitions in a world capital to a community-driven and –sourced sound tour in a post-war city and institution, from a “portable sound” museum proposal to specialized museums dedicated to musical instruments. And to open up further the number of perspectives, we are excited to include invited essays by leading sound studies scholars Holger Schulze, Jonathan Sterne and Zoe DeLuca, as well as a window into the creative process of Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz. These writers boldly challenge current sonic, spatial, social and political museum identities and practice. Through these contributions, we learned that sound is both a joy and an anxiety; both symbolic and literal. This assembly of papers makes clear that a lot remains to be done to measure the impact of sound in museums. In coming years, we hope this research will create new forms of engagement with (all) museum objects. We believe that a focus on the holistic role of sonic experience in the museum can enrich thinking and practice with (or “in”) our institutions. We hope the contributions published here will enhance our understanding of the museums’ role in today’s multifaceted world. Kathleen Wiens (kathleenwiens@gmail.com) is a lecturer, ethnomusicologist and interpretive planner currently based in Charlottetown, Canada. She worked at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (Winnipeg) from 2016–2019 during the development of this special issue. Previous to that, she served as Curator at the Musical Instrument Museum (Phoenix, USA). Eric de Visscher (e.devisscher@vam.ac.uk), Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor, V&A Research Institute (VARI), Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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