Fifteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Sound has been increasingly used in museums as a material with which to build exhibitions as part of a multimodal ensembles. This has given way to what I called sound-based multimodal museum practices. The ways in which sound materials have been deployed in these practices are diverse and lack categorisation and examination. They have long been driven by a complex interplay of circumstances. These circumstances include the underlying epistemological order and its conceptual constructs, the wider social and cultural orders in which these are enmeshed, existing, and emerging technological devices and situational and specific museum practices and their management options.This study proposes a typology of five constructs describing how sound materials have been used in museum by curators through time and to map exhibition practices. In greater detail, I argue that such practices tend to cluster into five categories: sound as a lecturing mode, sound as an artefact, sound as ‘ambiance’/soundtrack, sound as art, and sound as a mode for crowd-curation. My work draws on two types of data: fruitful insights gathered from the academic literature covering such practices and on my own observations stemming from my visits to a set of sixty-nine permanent and temporary museum exhibitions worldwide.