Why Listen to Museums?

This is the text of a talk I gave during the Soundscapes Late event at the National Gallery in London on 4 September, 2015. You can also download and listen to a recording of the talk on my SoundCloud page.

Review: Samsung Digital Discovery Centre, British Museum, 8-9 August 2015

Stepping into the Virtual Reality Weekend Immersive Fulldome in the Great Court at the British Museum yesterday, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had read the press release for the event, and knew that I was about to experience a digital recreation of a 4,000 year-old bronze age roundhouse, complete with digitally scanned recreations of objects within the British Museum’s collections – but what form would this actually take?

Towards a Museum of Museum Sounds

For the better part of a decade, I’ve been recording the sounds inside of museum spaces. While some of these recordings have been published either online or on CDs, an ideal situation would be for the recordings to be put on display in a public place, where people could listen to them, engage with them, discuss them, and hopefully find as much beauty, escapism, and poetry in them as I have. But what type of public space would be the best fit?

We Specifically Need More Ambiguity

Within its porous borders, the ambiguous contains a tremendous power to enable mystery and wonder. Within the indecisiveness of ambiguity lies the opportunity for equal-footed communication between artist and audience. As borders between disciplines become increasingly blurry, so the work produced using these hybrid methods may benefit from an inherent lack of specificity as well.