Listening in from the museum

Facilitated in part by technological innovation, a renewed embrace of sound as both the object and medium of curation has expanded the ways that the museum sector is staging exhibitions. This project will address how listening is facilitated in a museum context through an interdisciplinary combination of practice-led and scholarly research on exhibitions hosted by the Science Museum Group.

Focussed on the forthcoming exhibition about Mars and the new space gallery, the project offers rich potential to practically evaluate a range of approaches to sonic curation in a mainstream institutional context.

Over the last decade, what has been called 'the sonic turn' across the humanities has expanded to encompass museum studies. A small number of monographs, edited collections and two special issues have been produced that focus on the curatorial and experiential implications of attending to sound, addressing sound as both curatorial agent and object of display.

This has coincided with an expansion of historical, anthropological and sociological studies of sound and listening and their relationship with technology and place.

Simultaneously, sophisticated technologies have enabled novel immersive and interactive practices in heritage and museum sites. The Mars exhibition is an ideal space to explore the potential of these approaches because of the profound differences between Martian and earthly acoustics. Addressing the challenges of how to present the experience of listening on Mars, for example, would add a fresh perspective to the curatorial challenge of listening in on a range of sonic contexts: historical, cultural or atmospheric.