About

A one-day at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford

Thursday 28 June 2018, 11am – 6pm

The purpose of this one-day workshop is to bring academics, museum curators, audio and music industry professionals, and musicians into a discussion about objects of electronic sound and music (OESM). OESM include electronic musical instruments, and other electronic apparatus used to create, capture, manipulate, or reproduce sound: microphones, loudspeakers, mixing desks, hi-fi systems, iPods, and so on.

OESM are common in every-day life and increasingly numerous in museum collections, yet effective strategies for their interpretation and display in museums seem to be lacking. For example, glass-cases render these sounding objects mute and untouchable, meaning that their utility-defining sonic-tactile qualities are inaccessible to the museum visitor. While this might sometimes be unavoidable, explanatory text often tends to focus on the objects’ symbolic, semantic, social, historical, or cultural meanings, and thus also gives little impression of what the objects are actually like to use.

As the Museum has new ‘Sound and Vision’ galleries planned for 2022, the immediate question that this workshop seeks to address is:

• How should electronic musical instruments and other sound apparatus be interpreted and displayed by museums?

Further questions arising from the core question include:

• What aspects of working with OESM should museums seek to (re)present to a wider public?
• How might museums overcome the challenges of interpretation, display, and public engagement that these kinds of objects present?
• What OESM are worth displaying?
• What collections exist, and what collections/objects should museums seek to acquire?

From a more academic perspective:

• What existing scholarship in musicology, science and technology studies, history of technology, museum studies, or other disciplines, could usefully be brought to bear upon the study of OESM?
• What conceptual, theoretical, or methodological approaches are useful when studying these kinds of objects?
• What areas, relevant to the study of OESM, have been neglected by academics? What questions remain unanswered? What new approaches to the study of OESM need to be developed?

The aims of the workshop are two-fold:

• To produce preliminary recommendations for the acquisition, interpretation and display of OESM for Museum’s new Sound and Vision Galleries (opening 2022).
• To make plans for an ongoing interdisciplinary research network dedicated to the study of OESM, both in collaboration with museums and in a wider academic context.

For further information, or if you have any queries or suggestions, please contact [email protected].