Reel 2 Real - Audio - Sound in Museums

Sound in Museums

Audio from the 'Sound in Museums' event (7/12/2012)

On December 7th 2012 the Pitt Rivers Museum hosted 'Sound in Museums', a free one day workshop designed to set up a network of sound curators and museum professionals. The day included an introduction to the sound collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, presentations from five different sound curating projects, an overview of contemporary sound archiving from Janet Topp Fargion at the British Library, and then focused discussion of the key issues and themes related to curating sound in museums. This set of recordings is a full record of the day's proceedings.

Many museums and other cultural institutions hold significant collections of archival sound material, but very few know how to go about curating, storing, or digitizing such collections adequately, and are even more uncertain about how to deliver such collections in public galleries, online, or even how to make them accessible to researchers. The Pitt Rivers Museum, for example, holds a number of collections of ethnographic recordings from Vanuatu, the Central African Republic, and of children's games from across Europe, but has never been able to make them available for research until now. This workshop brought together specialists from the British Library, the Oxford eResearch Centre, sound artists, and curators from a number of museums in the UK to discuss recent case studies and the issues involved in dealing with archival sound collections. Some photos taken on the day are shown below.

Resources

Sound Galleries

Musical torchlit trails at the Pitt Rivers Museum

On Friday November 23rd 2012, the galleries of the Pitt Rivers Museum were plunged into evening darkness and bathed in Bayaka music and sound from the Central African Republic. Visitors were given torches to explore the galleries that were transformed into a rich forest soundscape with sung fables, snatches of laughter, beautiful variations on harps and flutes, and the stunning polyphonic singing of Bayaka women. Hidden surprises included mini projections from the rainforests and a visualiser designed by Nathaniel Mann, the PRM's Embedded Composer in Residence. The evening was filmed By Mike Day of Intrepid Cinema as part of the Reel to Real project, and complemented the Oxford City-wide Christmas Light Night organised by Oxford Inspires. A four hour playlist of Bayaka music from the PRM's sound collections, originally recorded by Louis Sarno, was curated on the evening by Nathaniel Mann and Dr Noel Lobley. The event was streamed online, and was watched live in the Central African Republic by Louis Sarno and some of the Bayaka community.