TY - JOUR TI - Acoustics on display: collecting and curating sound at the Science Museum AU -Jennifer Rich PY - 2017 VL - Special Issue: Sound and Vision IS - Spring 2017 KW - Acoustics KW - Cultural Politics KW - Display Practices KW - Listening KW - Science Museum KW - 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. N1 - 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. N1 - 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). N1 - SMD T-1931-26 Replica of Edison’s Original Phonograph N1 - Report of the Departmental Committee on the Science Museum and the Geological Museum 
(London: Board of Education, 1911) N1 - SMD ED79/115 Schemes for Development: Acoustic Instruments 1923-54 N1 - SMD 2851/1/1 HMV Pedestal gramophone, note from Baxandall to the Director, 27 March, 1928 N1 - SMD ED79/115, note from E Lancaster-Jones to D Baxandall, 7 March, 1928 N1 - SMD ED79/115, note from E Lancaster-Jones to D Baxandall, 13 January, 1928 N1 - Ibid N1 - Ibid N1 - Ibid N1 - ScM 2851 The Gramophone Company, note from D Follett to F Ward, 30 May 1946 N1 - ScM 2851 The Gramophone Company, note from D Follett to F Ward, 30 May 1946 N1 - ScM 2851 Letter from Gramophone Company to H Lyons, 6 December 1930 N1 - 1930 Annual Report N1 - ScM 2851 Note from D Follett to H Shaw, 20 March 1937 N1 - 1950 Annual Report N1 - 1951 Annual Report N1 - SMD 100/78, Proposals for the Acoustics Section N1 - SMD 9511, Script for the Radio-Guided Tour in the Iron and Steel Gallery, written and narrated by Walter Winton N1 - 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 N1 - SMD 9511, Appendix to note from Chew to Follett, ‘Comparison of the Acoustic Guide (AD) N1 - Ibid N1 - The Trumpet Shall Sound, The Hillandale News, February 1978, No.100, pp 21-22 N1 - 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 N1 - The Trumpet Shall Sound audio commentary N1 - SMD Special exhibition The Trumpet Shall Sound, Letter from EMI Director of Public Relations, B Samain to V Chew, 13 October 1976 N1 - SMD ScM920/68 Imperial War Museum, Memo from F A B Ward to V Chew, 2 December 1964 N1 - 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). N1 - 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). N1 - Ibid PB - The Science Museum Group SN - 2054-5770 LA - eng DO - 10.15180/170706 UR - https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/acoustics-on-display/ T2 - Science Museum Group Journal