Do You Hear What I Hear?
Lacking Sound Heritage: On Museums of Natural History and Paucities of Animal Acoustics in Exhibitions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ruth Hellier
Museums of natural history are major sites of global tourism, with an abundance of visual artefacts. This research examines the presence of sound and acoustics within these institutions, specifically of exhibitions relating to animal (beyond human) acoustics, as auditory communication and sense. Are these museums focused on sights and not sounds of natural history? These museums in major capital cities attract huge numbers of visitors, continuing their long trajectory as research institutions and tourist destinations with overt educational goals. As such, research-based evidence around the operation of these very institutions, specifically from the perspective of acoustics and sound is of practical relevance (for institutional decision-making) and theoretical significance, contributing to discussions around transformation and impact. This multidisciplinary research is primarily in conversation with performance studies, ecoacoustics, sound studies, museum studies, and environmental studies. Using a qualitative framework, data gathering has taken place with in-situ observation in ten institutions and through web presence analysis. Results demonstrate that animal acoustics—as descriptions, within exhibitions or as sound samples—rarely feature in these museums (for example, dead birds in glass cases devoid of sound). In these times of global environmental urgency, my evidence demonstrates that these institutions are stuck in problematic pasts, rooted in colonial discovery and collecting of objects, offering visitors an ecosystem with overt paucity. Taking this research would seek models of good practice to enable transformations providing tourists engagement with sound heritages for sound futures.
Music, Tourism, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Case Study from the Polish Tatra Mountains
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothy Cooley
Musicking tells us much about human engagement with local ecosystems. In this paper, I show how tourism has encouraged traditional musical practices in the alpine Tatra Mountains, but is also changing human relationships to the landscape. How might collaborations with environmental scientists empower performance traditions to reinvest in traditional ties to locally specific ecologies? What do music and other performance studies specialists have to contribute to our understandings of human impact on ecosystems? One contribution is qualitative studies grounded in long-term ethnographic research that documents local changes in human engagement with local ecologies. Our research shows that the expanding tourism industry in the Tatra region, funded by changing economic systems since 1989, have fundamentally changed many people’s relationship to the mountain landscape. In collaboration with local stakeholders, the objective of the research is to encourage governmental policy and tourism industry standards that honor the traditional relationships between humans and this unique mountain ecosystem, including documenting and celebrating the traditions of musicking (instrument making, singing, dancing, etc.) that models performatively how humans can live symbiotically within challenging landscapes.
