In working towards the establishment of a sound museum, it becomes essential to define what such an institution must collect, as the collection of objects has historically been viewed as essential to the mission of museums (Wittlin 1949, Macdonald 2011). While this notion has been gradually evolving to embrace intangible culture (Conn 2009, Gurian 2006), and work is developing related to the curation of sound in a museum context (Lobley 2015), I feel it is useful in the long term to propose an object-based methodology for sound curation centring around what I refer to as the acoustic object.
I write from the point of view of a practicing sound artist; having this perspective on the notion of sound and objects, it is my belief that much of the critical theory that has been developed around the artistic practice of working with sound has been hamstrung by a misunderstanding of sound’s relationship with music derived from many theorists’ reliance upon the ideas of composer John Cage. Cage, radical and useful as his ideas were for the time in which he worked, was a musician first and foremost, and therefore rightly approached the use of sound as a creative tool with a composer’s mindset. However, by defining all sound as music (Kahn 1999), Cage inverted the natural order of things: instead of music being thought of as one aspect of the much broader category of sound, all sound became music. Cage’s approach was indeed quite useful at the time as a means of opening up the world of sound as something not only important but inherently listenable to a wider audience. This allowed sounds to be accepted as they were, but ultimately only within a musical context: we could listen to any sound in any order and derive enjoyment from the experience as long as we kept in mind that what we were listening to was, in fact, music.
The usefulness of this classification has left the wider notion of sound at the mercy of music’s rules. Many sound art theorists to this day continue to take Cage’s assertion at face value – making music the measurement against which sound art is ultimately critiqued. It is my view that music – no matter how boundary-exploring or experimental – is merely one facet of the wider world of sound. In rejecting Cage’s categorisation, I assert that listeners have evolved since Cage’s time, and that the audience for sound art is now capable of accepting sounds as sounds themselves, regardless of context, and may accept them as listenable on their own rather than needing to interpret them as musical events in order to accept that they have meaning and worth.
Establishing sound as essentially non-musical, I then find myself subsequently appropriating a variation of one of the most fundamentally musical terms in sound studies: the acoustic object. There is, however, a fundamental contextual difference between my use of “acoustic object” and “sound object,” the preferred English translation of modernist composer Pierre Schaeffer’s l’objet sonore. Schaeffer’s term relates to non-musical sounds recorded onto magnetic tape that could then be manipulated into musical compositions (Schaeffer in Cox and Warner 2002), while my use of “acoustic object” is further revealing of my non-musical approach to the concept of sound as art. In order to discuss the collection and curation of sound as an object within the field of museology, it is necessary to think of sound from the more recently emergent anthropological point of view “. . . that reframes sound as an object of culture and human agency” (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015). This critical approach to sound allows it to exist as a relic beyond musicality, while at the same time allowing for the categorisation of music as a cultural object – in my view, a more logical and inclusive method of thinking about sound in general.
For my purposes then, the term “acoustic object” can be said to represent any collectible sonic event, including recordings, sound-making physical objects, sound art (artworks that use sound as their material), installations, performances, and any other audible artefacts of intangible culture. This may, in fact, include those bits of magnetic tape that Pierre Schaeffer used to create his pieces of musique concrète, but it can also include much more. The usual philosophical questions surrounding the essence of an object within an art context are relevant to this notion of acoustic objects, and will no doubt need to be further explored and defined within my ongoing research; for with the addition of the ephemerality inherent within sound, the object-ness of the cultural items I am proposing that museums should collect becomes severely complicated. I am confident, however, that museums may be able to draw upon the experience of established sound archives such as the British Library Sound Archive in order to establish criteria for the identification, categorisation, and presentation of acoustic objects.
Works Cited
Conn, S. “Do Museums Still Need Objects?.” Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 20-57, 235-238. Print.
Gurian, E. H. “What is the Object of this Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums.” Civilizing the Museum. New York: Routledge, 2006. 33-47. Print.
Kahn, Douglas. “John Cage: Silence and Silencing.” Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Boston: MIT, 1999. 161-199. Print.
Lobley, Noel. “Curating Sound for Future Communities.” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research. Hampshire, Palsgrave MacMillan, 2015. 234-247. Print.
Macdonald, Sharon. “Collecting Practices.” A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 81-98. Print.
Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. Keywords in Sound. Durham and London: Duke University Press Books, 2015. 1-11. Print.
Schaeffer, Pierre. “Acousmatics.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2004. 76-81. Print.
Wittlin, Alma S. “The Public Museum.” The Museum: Its History and Its Tasks in Education. London: Routledge, 1949. 109-135. Print.
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