Resonant Bodies: A discussion about listening in museums

In his research and curatorial work, Eric de Visscher has been challenging the perception that museums are places for looking rather than listening. In this conversation with musicologist Gascia Ouzounian, the pair discuss sonic exhibits, the noise of museums and how sound might make museums more inclusive institutions. This piece has been edited for length; the full conversation can be heard at sonic.city.

Gascia Ouzounian As someone who works across the worlds of music, sound and museums, you have quite a unique profile. You’ve held positions as the artistic director of IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) in Paris and as the director of Musée de la Musique in Paris. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started to work in this broad area between music, sound and museums?

Eric de Visscher It’s a long story…

…So that was really the idea of connecting these different worlds.

Gascia Recently you edited a special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal, and in the introduction to that issue, you were writing with Kathleen Wiens about how sound has been diminished as an aspect in the museum, both historically and today, and how visual aspects of the museum experience have been very much privileged. You gave the example of how in the nineteenth century there was an almost devotional attitude to the artefacts in the museum. People were meant to be quiet, it was a social norm that you should not disturb the experience of looking at and appreciating an object in the museum. And you write that, even in the twentieth century, the white cube that emerged as the normative model for many modern and contemporary art museums seems exclusively geared towards the visual, that museums’ generally reverberant spaces neglect the visitors’ acoustic wellbeing or experience. ¹ Can you give us some examples of interesting or successful projects that you think are disturbing or disrupting this profoundly ocular-centric aspect of the museum?

Eric There’s been a general trend for the last, let’s say 20 years…

…this story of sound is also a story about hardware – not only the kind of fleeting and immaterial, intangible, matter that we usually associate with music.

Gascia Yes, this idea that you go to listen to music and you have a temporary experience and it goes away. What you’re describing here is a very multi-sensory experience. You walk into the David Bowie exhibition and you can see all of the visual aspects of that story but you’re also immersed in the sonic space. It creates a much more coherent and cohesive space and a way in which you can navigate that space through the sonic dimension. Bringing sound into the museum does open up so many new worlds, connecting to contemporary and popular cultures. For the last few years you have been spearheading a project at the V&A Research Institute (VARI) on sound in the museum. Can you tell us a little bit about that project? In particular what some of the aims are when you’re thinking about a museum that has such an immense collection of many different kinds of historical artefacts but also has this link to contemporary culture and is such an iconic space for cultural experiences in London.

Eric I think this project was a way of expanding…

…and this is certainly something we want to pursue in future projects.

Gascia The project by Caroline Devine really gave me a sense of how artists and curators are now exploring the material aspects of sound that can be very intimate, that you can sense through touch. That resonant aspect of it feels very alive. You can also connect to what you’re hearing in a much more intimate way, in contrast to the distance that you sometimes have with simply viewing an object. I think it’s this other sensorial aspect of sound which is, when you’re thinking about it in the museum context, brought to the foreground in this case.

Eric What also interested me, was to explore that particular space not just as an architectural space but as a sonic space…

…part of my work at the V&A was to make museum people aware that sound was present in the museum, whether they want it there or not.

Gascia I remember a great example of that…

…I know that you have been thinking about this a lot recently with the Covid-19 situation; about how the ways in which the museum will change when spaces start to re-open, and how that comes out of this idea of the bodies of the visitors as well. Could you tell us a little bit about these changes?

Eric In a way, the Covid-19 crisis has made us much more aware of the body than we used to be: both our bodies and other people’s bodies. It’s quite interesting to observe how people have changed their bodily attitude. In a way we are performing differently than we used to in social space. And we are starting to see the consequences of that for many experiences. For instance, we see all the problems to be faced in thinking about reopening theatres, concert halls or cinemas. Museums are a little more manageable as enclosed spaces than theatres. Museums are more spaces of movement, of transition, of flow, and so it’s maybe a little bit easier to handle. But it is certainly going to be different. We have to rethink the ways in which we provide experiences for visitors and how this kind of re-embodied experience will change our relation to the objects that we show. The idea of the super-packed, blockbuster exhibition that everyone wants to go and see at the same time is something that, in the short term at least, will be difficult to re-organise.

Again, if we consider an embodied relation to the objects, the use of sound could be a very powerful way of creating a relationship and empowering it by providing another type of content. Maybe another type of experience; not just a didactic and visually-led one but something that can be much more sensitive and experiential. These are some of the ideas which we would like to explore.

There is another consequence of the pandemic: that some people will not be able to go to the museum because travel is not encouraged. This means all the pre-existing reasons, such as economic and larger social and cultural issues, which meant certain people did not visit museums, might be aggravated. So there is the added responsibility for museums to reach even more people now than we did beforehand. How can we reach audiences who cannot go to the museum? Of course, museums have been online for a while and this has hugely expanded during the crisis. We’ve seen museums offer virtual tours and exhibitions and games and all sorts of things. We need to assess these strategies to see exactly how they have been received. Is it the same audiences that usually go to the museum and are better equipped in terms of digital access? Or were these visitors ones who were already prevented from going to museums before? We have to look at even more accessible tools. We’re thinking about using sound and more easily transportable ways in which music can be distributed, through personal devices obviously, but also radio and other things that even people who are not digitally-minded can make use of.

Gascia I know this question of access is high on the agenda…

…how do you see that happening in this specific situation with the V&A in east London?

Eric In a way it’s a bit of a paradox saying museums can be places for a new sonic urbanism, because, as we talked about before, historically museums have been so asonic, so visually-oriented. Now we see that some change is happening and people are gradually understanding museums as places where they can meet and things can happen – as multi-sensorial places.

In the particular context of east London the V&A will install both a new museum, a set of galleries and also a new collections centre, which means that all the storage of the museum will be moved there. This collections centre will be accessible to the public in various ways. The idea is to bring the whole collection into contact, not only with the traditional museum audiences, but also with other audiences, in particular the east London audience. We know that the Olympic Park is surrounded by some of the most diverse but also the most deprived areas in the UK. These are also very young neighbourhoods in terms of population and there is a particular history of sound there. Grime music came about in east London and there’s been a history of independent radio there, a very politically‑engaged and motivated history.

So how do you create a link with this big national institution with all its colonial and imperial past? How do you engage in the process of decolonisation? I think sound could be a very good way to create those links, and also for there to be some kind of co-creation where we could involve really different local communities in creating content for themselves in relation to some of the objects that are in the museum – even in paradoxical or problematic ways – that can be related to their own history.

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