Content uploaded by Hein Schoer
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Hein Schoer on Mar 30, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
The Sounding Museum: Box of Treasures
Abstract
The »Sounding Museum« fuses anthropology, acoustic ecology, soundscape composition, and trans-cultural communication inside the context of museum education. Based on the piece »Two Weeks in Alert Bay«, it supplies researchers, practitioners, and audiences with an instrument to gain an acoustic image of the contemporary cultural and everyday life of the Kwakwaka'wakw of Alert Bay, BC. The project mediates intercultural competence thorough the affective agency of sound. With the coeval »Session Musician's Approach«, introduced and analysed in text, audio, and interactive form, it also bridges the gap between art, science, and education. With a foreword by Barry Truax. The box includes a book, 2 DVD and 1 CD.
... The integration of sound in museum exhibitions in order to transmit information highlights the informative role of sound as a means of enhancing the cognitive context of museum objects. Sonic practices with an informative role are based on the support, enhancement, or replacement of written text by textual elements read aloud by a narrator [38]. This allows the incorporation of a larger amount of information than that which may be integrated in the typical exhibition text (which has a number of specific limitations such as space constraints and the ability of visitors to read lengthy text). ...
Museums are increasingly incorporating sound in their exhibitions both as an exhibit and an interpretative medium. This paper traces the relationship between sound and museums, and then focuses on the integration of sound into the exhibition space. It is noted that, although the functional aspects related to the use of sound in museum exhibitions have been scrutinised, the exploration of sound as an interpretive medium is rather overlooked. To fill in this gap, the paper discusses sonic practices in contemporary museums and suggests a new classifying scheme for studying sound in museums. The proposed classification focuses on the three main roles accorded to sound in the exhibition environment: informative, interpretive, immersive. The various examples discussed provide ample evidence of the potential of sound in revitalising the museum experience.
... Smith 2015). However, with a few exceptions (Martinz-Turek 2004;Lane and Nye 2005;Jakubowski 2011;Kunz-Ott 2012;Byrne 2012;Cluett 2014;Binter 2014;Bubaris 2014;Koenig 2014;MacKinnon 2014;Schoer 2014;Voegelin 2014;Cox 2015;Bijsterveld 2015) the uses of sounds and silence in museums are hardly ever touched upon. In this article, I will therefore refer to other disciplines in which sound has been a topic such as cultural sound studies and sound history, as well as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. ...
Using an interdisciplinary approach, this article analyses the uses of sound and silence in three Polish history museums: POLIN – Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Warsaw Rising Museum and the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow’s exhibition Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945. It argues that in these museums sounds and silence serve a sentimental education. They are used both to transmit historical knowledge in a sensorial way and to affectively engage visitors. Diegetic sounds thereby generally serve the transmission of historical knowledge, whereas non-diegetic sounds are used as affective triggers. In tis way, a sonic immersion is achieved that induces visitors to feel as if they were in the past as well as inviting them to emotionally engage with this past.
Sound-producing objects, such as musical instruments and sound devices, are a distinct category of museum objects because their museification has deprived them of their primary characteristic: sound. This paper discusses the use of sound as an interpretive tool in exhibitions of sound-producing objects. After reviewing the use of sound as an interpretive medium in contemporary museum exhibitions, the discussion focuses on sound-producing objects and analyses the concerns about their functionality in the museum context. The last section of the paper introduces sonic references, a specific type of sonic practices integrated in contemporary museum exhibitions. The documentation of the interpretive approaches adopted towards sound-producing objects aims to explore the potential of sound in creating meaningful experiences for museum visitors. Finally, the paper seeks to encourage sound-led curatorial strategies that explore more experiential ways to engage visitors with museum exhibitions.
Based on the authors' field experiences, one of anthropology's main theoretical reflections in the past decade is used here as a starting point: the relations between humans and non-humans. It reveals that the role of sound is paramount within the Amerindian ontology named animism, especially if compared to Western naturalism and its visual primacy. Consequently, we propose an auditory anthropology as a theoretical concept, underpinned by further examples from the field. Finally, the practical application of an auditory anthropology is discussed. Researchers may make use of cultural soundscape composition in order to supply a museum's audience with a means to listen to the manifold cultures of the world.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.