RT Journal Article T1 Acoustics on display: collecting and curating sound at the Science Museum A1 Jennifer Rich YR 2017 VO Special Issue: Sound and Vision IS Spring 2017 K1 Acoustics K1 Cultural Politics K1 Display Practices K1 Listening K1 Science Museum K1 sound AB This article traces sound as it echoes through approaches to displaying the Science Museum’s acoustics collection over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing on three key moments in the collection’s historical development, the article explores the role of sound as both medium and object of museum display. Each moment exposes how the practice of using sound to interpret sounding objects was articulated and problematised by past generations of museum practitioners. Each moment, too, exposes the problem of sound as a potential threat to the cultural politics of a national museum, disrupting the economies of the senses governing the museum as a consecrated space for learning. Thinking historically, this article excavates a body of practical experience and expertise which has the potential to support a growing body of modern museum practitioners using sound as a medium for, and object of, museum display. NO Scholars working within the now expansive interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies have already thought critically about these multiple affordances of sound. Georgina Born (2013; 7) for example has called for a ‘social phenomenology of music and sound’: a single theoretical framework capable of holding together the affective and the reflective, the proximate and distant, the real and the abstract. Brandon LaBelle’s (2010) concept of the ‘arc of sound’ is also useful in this regard, in capturing the unique capacity of sound to shuttle between the representational and non-representational realms. NO Was this a result of the 1876 Scientific Apparatus Exhibition? ‘The Scientific Apparatus Exhibition.-Con-.’ Times (London, England) 11 May 1876: 12. The Times Digital Archive. (accessed 11 May 2016). NO SMD T-1931-26 Replica of Edison’s Original Phonograph NO Report of the Departmental Committee on the Science Museum and the Geological Museum 
(London: Board of Education, 1911) NO SMD ED79/115 Schemes for Development: Acoustic Instruments 1923-54 NO SMD 2851/1/1 HMV Pedestal gramophone, note from Baxandall to the Director, 27 March, 1928 NO SMD ED79/115, note from E Lancaster-Jones to D Baxandall, 7 March, 1928 NO SMD ED79/115, note from E Lancaster-Jones to D Baxandall, 13 January, 1928 NO Ibid NO Ibid NO Ibid NO ScM 2851 The Gramophone Company, note from D Follett to F Ward, 30 May 1946 NO ScM 2851 The Gramophone Company, note from D Follett to F Ward, 30 May 1946 NO ScM 2851 Letter from Gramophone Company to H Lyons, 6 December 1930 NO 1930 Annual Report NO ScM 2851 Note from D Follett to H Shaw, 20 March 1937 NO 1950 Annual Report NO 1951 Annual Report NO SMD 100/78, Proposals for the Acoustics Section NO SMD 9511, Script for the Radio-Guided Tour in the Iron and Steel Gallery, written and narrated by Walter Winton NO SMD 9511, Appendix to note from Chew to Follett entitled ‘Comparison of the Acoustic Guide (AD) system and the Fixed Tape Recorder [FTR] System’, 19 March 1964 NO SMD 9511, Appendix to note from Chew to Follett, ‘Comparison of the Acoustic Guide (AD) NO Ibid NO The Trumpet Shall Sound, The Hillandale News, February 1978, No.100, pp 21-22 NO SMD Special exhibition The Trumpet Shall Sound (centenary of the phonograph). Then MP Edward Heath was initially invited to open the exhibition due, as Chew wrote, to ‘his eminence, his known love of music and his association with EMI as a recording conductor’. Heath was forced to pull out, however, due to other engagements and Janet Baker was selected as his replacement. SMD Special exhibition The Trumpet Shall Sound, Note from Chew to Follett, 14 February, 1977 NO The Trumpet Shall Sound audio commentary NO SMD Special exhibition The Trumpet Shall Sound, Letter from EMI Director of Public Relations, B Samain to V Chew, 13 October 1976 NO SMD ScM920/68 Imperial War Museum, Memo from F A B Ward to V Chew, 2 December 1964 NO For a discussion on the role of the eye in governing knowledge within the spaces of the art gallery, see Harriet Hawkins (2010a). This article is part of a broader body of work in Cultural Geography on the part played by the senses in art’s expanding field during the second half of the twentieth century (Hawkins, 2010b; Morris, 2011; Warren, 2012; Hawkins, 2013). NO It is not possible to say that all visitors responded to the exhibition in this way due to the lack of audience research at the time. Yet these embodied responses by members of the specialist press do reaffirm established museum exhibition techniques that seek to organise knowledge through the visible arrangement, classification and inspection of objects (Bennett, 1995). NO Ibid PB The Science Museum Group SN 2054-5770 LA eng DO 10.15180/170706 UL https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/acoustics-on-display/ WT Science Museum Group Journal OL 30