John Kannenberg | Museum of Portable Sound (original) (raw)
Book Chapters by John Kannenberg
The Oxford Handbook of Museum Archaeology , 2022
What does an archaeology museum sound like? Museum practitioners in general have, in the past dec... more What does an archaeology museum sound like? Museum practitioners in general have, in the past decade, participated in a ‘multisensory turn’ within the humanities, bringing a new awareness to the potentialities for sound and soundscapes in exhibition strategies. This chapter explores the intersections between archaeology, sound, and museums, offering brief overviews of sound’s relationship with archaeology and museum practice while providing key examples of sound on display within archaeology museums. Finally, a case study of an artistic research project, the Museum of Portable Sound, explores a museological object-based approach to the curation of sounds within the archaeology museum, demonstrating how empathic listening between institution and visitor can contribute positively to visitor experience.
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Books by John Kannenberg
Sounds Beyond Music: Selected Objects From The Museum Of Portable Sound, 2023
The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) is an independent institution currently based in Portsmouth, ... more The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) is an independent institution currently based in Portsmouth, UK dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting sounds as objects. MOPS focuses primarily on non-musical sound because, let's face it, music is the most talked-about form of sound there is – and we feel there's a whole world of sounds beyond music that are just as worthy of everyone's attention. This exhibit at the University of Portsmouth Library [15 November 2023 – 31 January 2024] is drawn from the MOPS Physical Objects Collection, a secondary complement to our primary Permanent Collection of Sounds. MOPS began as a museum that is listened to rather than looked at, and we hope the subjects we've covered here might inspire a curiosity to give attention to sounds in the world around you that you might otherwise ignore.
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(Selected preview) Compiled, written, and designed by John Kannenberg The third edition of the M... more (Selected preview)
Compiled, written, and designed by John Kannenberg
The third edition of the Museum of Portable Sound Gallery Guide expands upon the groundwork of the previous editions, becoming an introductory textbook to the cross-disciplinary culture of sound.
Now including 317 objects subdivided into 30 galleries, every object label and didactic panel is included in the updated Gallery Guide. There are also several galleries covering all-new topics unavailable in previous editions: Humans, Underwater Life, Machines, Fountains, Elevators and Escalators, Railway Stations, and Walks. A greatly expanded number of 'Listening Close-Up' didactic panels broaden the scope of the stories told in each gallery beyond the objects on display, with topics including the invention of the modern microphone, the forgotten history of the wire recorder, a timeline of portable sound technologies, the Doppler Effect, the invention of the stethoscope, the ancient origin of earplugs, and an essay on the links between curiosity and close listening. While the Permanent Collection Galleries focus on digital sound objects, an illustrated catalogue of the museum's Physical Objects Collection further explores the tangible artefacts of sound culture.
Other features new to the 3rd Edition include:
• SOUND: An Extremely Brief Introduction
• Glossary of Sound and Culture Terms
• Revised and expanded Reading List
• Curator's Top 40 Objects Playlist
• #PortableSoundPoll Archive
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The catalogue for a series of exhibitions featuring works generated by a rigorously imprecise dra... more The catalogue for a series of exhibitions featuring works generated by a rigorously imprecise drawing method that metaphorically represents the imperfection embedded within the human experience of the infinite. The exhibition series culminated in a performance, An Hour of Infinity, at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology featuring eight live drawing performers, two musicians improvising to graphic scores based upon museum objects, and two multichannel sound installations that used sounds of the Kelsey Museum as their source material. The catalogue discusses the artist's ideas about the human experience of the infinite as well as the idea of "the active sounds of history," the sounds generated when museum visitors engage sonically with museum objects.
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Published Articles by John Kannenberg
Curator: The Museums Journal, 2019
In the 1991 book Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display, Stephen Greenbl... more In the 1991 book Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display, Stephen Greenblatt introduced the concept of a museological ‘resonance’: the idea that objects on display within a museum exhibition ‘resonate’, or generate new meanings, via their relationships with the visitors who observe and interact with them. This approach to meaning‐making has since impacted greatly upon the strategies museum curators follow when selecting and juxtaposing physical objects. This paper explores how Greenblatt’s notion of museological resonance could be applied to the display of sounds themselves as cultural objects within a museum context. A mixtape or playlist‐inspired approach to constructivist learning is proposed to re‐imagine how sounds might be able to function within traditionally object‐based museum exhibition. Soundmarks – sounds that reoccur within local communities which help to define their unique cultural identity – are presented as a potential area of research and collection by museums, while post‐industrial soundmarks such as traffic signals for the visually impaired and the interface sounds of public transport systems are suggested as deserving of curatorial care via an expanded notion of intangible cultural heritage.
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Curator: The Museums Journal (online content), 2019
In this age of digital news and social media, our lives have become portable. The Museum of Porta... more In this age of digital news and social media, our lives have become portable. The Museum of Portable Sound is a reflection on this, being both a sign of the times in its boundary-breaking approach, yet also a catalogue of the way in which sound has been used, experienced and perceived over time since we first were able to record it. This mobile museum was established in November 2015 in London, UK and allows visitors to arrange their experience on a one-to-one basis with the curator, or in small groups at a location and time of their choice. Though portable, the museum has galleries, temporary exhibitions and education programmes. With the museum set to receive its 1,000th visitor any day, I spoke with Director and Chief Curator, John Kannenberg about the development of the museum he has built, how it fosters human connections, and its place within the lexicon of museology and sound art.
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Portable Gray, 2019
Philip von Zweck and John Kannenberg met about twenty years ago via the lowercase-sound email lis... more Philip von Zweck and John Kannenberg met about twenty years ago via the lowercase-sound email list and have been discussing sound, music, and sound art ever since. Both artists, von Zweck came to sound art via his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began as a painter and ended up in the Sound Department, while Kannenberg, also trained as a painter, developed an interest in creative sound via his work in multimedia as a Web 1.0 web designer in the 1990s. von Zweck hosted Something Else, a radio program devoted to experimental music and creative sound, on WLUW in Chicago from 1996 to 2010 and has taught sound, radio, art, and related courses at a variety of colleges and universities. Kannenberg was a frequent performer on the show and occasional guest host, all the while running a netlabel dedicated to experimental music, Stasisfield.com. Kannenberg eventually moved to London to pursue a PhD in sound and museum studies with a creative practice centered around his Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS): since 2015, a single mobile phone containing hundreds of his field recordings categorized according to traditional museological notions of culture. It is not available as an app, but rather must be visited in person in a face-to-face meeting to emphasize the social aspect of the museum experience.
The pair recently had a Skype discussion—von Zweck in Chicago, Kannenberg in Portsmouth, UK—to continue their years-long debate over whether sound art is actually a thing, and if so, what its definition should be.
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Science Museum Group Journal, 2017
As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum pract... more As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum practice have focused on providing audiences with multisensory experiences. Books such as 2014’s The Multisensory Museum present preliminary strategies by which museums might help visitors engage with collections using senses beyond the visual. In this article, an overview of the multisensory roots of museum display and an exploration of the shifting definition of ‘object’ leads to a discussion of Pierre Schaeffer’s musical term objet sonore – the ‘sound object’, which has traditionally stood for recorded sounds on magnetic tape used as source material for electroacoustic musical composition. A problematic term within sound studies, this article proposes a revised definition of ‘sound object’, shifting it from experimental music into the realm of the author’s own experimental curatorial practice of establishing The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution dedicated to the collection and display of sounds as cultural objects. Utilising Brian Kane’s critique of Schaeffer, Christoph Cox and Casey O’Callaghan’s thoughts on sonic materialism, Dan Novak and Matt Sakakeeny’s anthropological approach to sound theory, and art historian Alexander Nagel’s thoughts on the origins of art forgery, this article presents a new working definition of the sound object as a museological (rather than a musical) concept.
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Museological Review No. 20: The Global Microphone, Apr 2016
The multisensory experience of museums is becoming increasingly scrutinised, with many museums be... more The multisensory experience of museums is becoming increasingly scrutinised, with many museums beginning to include participatory activities based on their own soundscapes in their public engagement programs. What are some possible strategies for engaging with a museum soundscape? Could listening to museums lead to the development of a sonically inclusive museology? In my artistic practice, I make sound maps of museums including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, and The Pitt Rivers at Oxford. These sound maps are immersive audio tours juxtaposing sounds in new contexts like museum curators juxtapose objects in exhibitions. I also make blind listening sketches of museum soundscapes using an evolving lexicon of museum sound symbols. In this paper, I contextualise my museum sound mapping strategies within practices of sound arts and other mapping practices, and provide documentation of my results, including sound compositions and drawings that map my acts of listening to museum soundscapes.
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A survey of recent and upcoming sound map projects collecting sounds from museums and archives.
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Memory is at the heart of much human activity. Memory drives us to collect, to record, to create ... more Memory is at the heart of much human activity. Memory drives us to collect, to record, to create documents –"information or evidence that serves as an official record" – that we then spend a lot of time and effort preserving. Some of these documents are strictly personal and kept as family heirlooms. Others end up being judged by someone else as having a broader significance, and end up being preserved in places like museums and libraries in order that they be made accessible to a wider audience. There are countless institutions around the world whose mission statements may not explicitly express it, but which are essentially dedicated to honoring the human desire to remember.
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PhD Thesis by John Kannenberg
This practice-based project begins with an exploration of the acoustic environments of a variety ... more This practice-based project begins with an exploration of the acoustic environments of a variety of contemporary museums via field recording and sound mapping. Through a critical listening practice, this mapping leads to a central question: can sounds act as objects analogous to physical objects within museum practice – and if so, what is at stake in creating a museum that only exhibits sounds?
Given the interest in collection and protection of intangible culture within contemporary museum practice, as well as the evolving anthropological view of sound as an object of human culture, this project suggests that a re-definition of Pierre Shaeffer’s oft-debated term ‘sound object’ within the context of museum practice may be of use in reimagining how sounds might be able to function within traditionally object-based museum exhibition practices. Furthermore, the longstanding notion of ‘soundmarks’ – sounds that reoccur within local communities which help to define their unique cultural identity – is explored as a means by which post-industrial sounds such as traffic signals for the visually impaired and those made by public transport, may be considered deserving of protection by museum practitioners.
These ideas are then tested via creative practice by establishing an experimental curatorial project, The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), an institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting sounds as objects of culture and human agency. MOPS displays sounds, collected via the author’s field recording practice, as museological objects that, like the physical objects described by Stephen Greenblatt, ‘resonate’ with the outside world – but also with each other, via their careful selection and sequencing that calls back to the mix tape culture of the late twentieth century.
The unconventional form of MOPS – digital audio files on a single mobile phone accompanied by a museum ‘map’ and Gallery Guide – emphasizes social connections between the virtual and the physical. The project presents a viable format via which sounds may be displayed as culture while also interrogating what a museum can be in the twenty first century.
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Conference Presentations by John Kannenberg
Decolonizing Sonic Heritage Spaces: A HEIF-funded Knowledge Exchange Workshop, 2023
In the early 2000s, a group of academics sought to establish sound studies as an academic discipl... more In the early 2000s, a group of academics sought to establish sound studies as an academic discipline analogous to visual culture, a body of work that could interrogate the so-called ‘history of sound’ as a wider cultural study of ‘sound beyond music’ (Mansell, 2021). As sound studies has increasingly been absorbed into the fields of musicology and ‘sound art’, this initial desire to explore sound’s wider cultural connections via historical analysis has struggled to remain at the fore of the discipline as more scholars embrace an attitude of ‘musical exceptionalism’ (Devine, 2019) that confers a greater importance to musicological histories. In following a more ‘traditional’ sound studies approach – beyond just music – the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), a small independent museum in Portsmouth, UK, has attempted to deconstruct accepted histories of sound rooted in 19th century white European and American perspectives. By presenting sounds as museum objects, MOPS uses traditional museological taxonomies to offer visitors ways of thinking about sounds, their histories and auditors, that spotlight unexpected stories of how attitudes supposedly relegated to the past including colonialism, white supremacy, gender inequality, institutionalised racism, and homophobia continue to echo throughout contemporary life to the present day.
References:
Devine, Kyle. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
Mansell, James. ‘Historical Acoustemology: Past, Present, and Future’. Music Research Annual, no. 2 (2021): 1–19.
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![Research paper thumbnail of Intangible Industrial Heritage: The Collections of Audio Interfaces and Transport at The Museum of Portable Sound [Abstract]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/54668375/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](A soundmark is a site-specific sound typically generated by an object or a machine that, once not... more A soundmark is a site-specific sound typically generated by an object or a machine that, once noticed, becomes an identifier of a community (Schafer 1994). Industrial heritage typically focuses on the physical and mechanical remains of industry (Douet 2012); yet museum practice has gradually evolved over the past few decades to also embrace intangible cultural heritage – including human-centric oral traditions, social customs, languages, and ceremonies (Alivizatou, 2016). Subsequently, in recent years philosophers have proposed an object-oriented ontology, one that attempts to empathise with the experiences of objects themselves (Bryant 2011). One way to study the experiences of objects is through the sounds that they make; as a phonographer (one who collects field recordings) working in urban environments, I have collected sounds of industry and displayed them within my own institution, The Museum of Portable Sound. This presentation explores how soundmarks might potentially be classified as industrial heritage and/or intangible culture. Via listening to sounds of audio traffic signals and trains from the Museum's Audio Interfaces and Transport galleries, this discussion of the taxonomies and didactic strategies involved in their presentation as museum objects will point towards an expanded notion of intangible cultural heritage that includes mechanical as well as human soundings. In turn, these exhibition strategies may help begin to explore new contexts for multisensory content within the museological display of industrial heritage.
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![Research paper thumbnail of Curating Sound as an Object of Culture and Human Agency: A Case Study of The Museum of Portable Sound [Abstract]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/54667896/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](ISACS17 Resonant Worlds: Sound, Art and Science at ZKM Center for Art & Media Karlsruhe, Germany: 28-30 September, 2017
In the introduction to the book Keywords in Sound (2015), authors David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny ... more In the introduction to the book Keywords in Sound (2015), authors David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny describe a tension existent within their editorial perspective for the book's lexicon of keywords in sound studies. The authors suggest that it is the conflicts between their experiences as musicologists and as anthropologists that have guided them to approach the subject of sound. Anthropology, they suggest, " reframes sound as an object of culture and human agency " (5), which creates a tension with music's lengthy history establishing " systems of sonic production and analysis. " As an artist, curator, and museologist, my own creative practice has moved in the direction of conceptualising sound in the anthropological sense described by Novak and Sakakeeny. This non-musical, culturally-centred perspective on sound merged with my interest in exploring new forms of museum practice, leading me to establish The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) in November 2015. Since then, I have served as the Director and Chief Curator of an institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting sounds as objects of culture and human agency, presenting sounds as museological objects which resonate off each other in a similar manner to the physical objects of conventional museums. MOPS's objects, however, are digital audio files stored on a single mobile phone, disconnected from the Internet or any mobile networks, and must be listened to in person by MOPS visitors – deliberately, no audio files are distributed online, and there is no app to download. Visits to the Museum are usually conducted on an individual basis, with myself meeting the visitor and presenting them with the mobile phone, a map of the Museum's galleries, and a printed Gallery Guide book containing supporting didactic texts, transforming the Museum visit into a performative, ritualistic experience similar to those discussed by museologist Carol Duncan, but with a shifting of the usual museum power structure: MOPS visitors are offered a private audience with the Director at every visit, allowing them the opportunity for critical dialogue with the institution itself. After more than five hundred visits, this paper will present my preliminary findings from this experiment, focusing on sound's potential as the basis for a new, museological sound object-based curatorial practice beyond architecture that brings the culture of sound to the world, one listener at a time.
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![Research paper thumbnail of The Museum of Portable Sound: Establishing a 21st century museum without walls, a paleonomy of the ‘sound object,’ and a case for a more sonically inclusive museology [Abstract]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/43653847/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](As the multisensory experience of museums continues to become an increasing concern for museum pr... more As the multisensory experience of museums continues to become an increasing concern for museum professionals, my research focuses on increasing awareness of the sonic component of the museum experience. To this end, I have established The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution consisting of audio files on a mobile phone, which can present its collections to the listening public anywhere. This 21st century version of André Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’ explores the culture of listening within a museological context, as well as the experience of listening to a museum itself, as its exhibitions contain (among other things) recordings of sound-related technology and recordings of museum soundscapes from around the world. This presentation will explore the philosophical underpinnings of The Museum of Portable Sound, including my desire to reclaim the term ‘sound object’ from 20th century composer Pierre Schaeffer – who established the term to refer to recorded sounds as a source for musical composition – adjusting its meaning to function instead within museology, allowing ‘sound object’ to refer to any material that is or produces sound that may be collected, interpreted, and exhibited as an object within a museum context. This reclaiming is accomplished via Derrida’s notion of the paleonomy, the adjustment of an old term’s meaning that allows for its use in establishing a new notion; in this case, it is my hope to use this new definition for ‘sound object’ to propose to the museum community that sound may be collected much like the visual or physical objects they are already accustomed to, and also to consider how the public exhibition of sonic objects might allow a museum’s soundscape to assist in fulfilling the tenets of its mission of engagement with their audience.
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Artist statement discussing the process and philosophy behind an hour-long soundscape composition... more Artist statement discussing the process and philosophy behind an hour-long soundscape composition created using field recordings made at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during April and May 2010. The piece has since been released on compact disc and presented as a sound installation at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology's 2011 conference in Corfu, Greece.
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Talks by John Kannenberg
What makes up the afterlife of an exhibition? How do exhibition catalogues relate to the exhibiti... more What makes up the afterlife of an exhibition? How do exhibition catalogues relate to the exhibition experience? If we display 3-D printed copies of artefacts, can they still find ways to resonate as 'authentic' with audiences? Does the sound of an exhibition space ever echo what is on visual display there?
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The text of a public talk given at the National Gallery, London, on 4 September 2015, as part of ... more The text of a public talk given at the National Gallery, London, on 4 September 2015, as part of the Soundscapes Late event, this talk discusses the sonic experience of museums – what museums sound like, as well as what visitors can bring to their own sonic experience of museums through the process of phonomnesis.
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The Oxford Handbook of Museum Archaeology , 2022
What does an archaeology museum sound like? Museum practitioners in general have, in the past dec... more What does an archaeology museum sound like? Museum practitioners in general have, in the past decade, participated in a ‘multisensory turn’ within the humanities, bringing a new awareness to the potentialities for sound and soundscapes in exhibition strategies. This chapter explores the intersections between archaeology, sound, and museums, offering brief overviews of sound’s relationship with archaeology and museum practice while providing key examples of sound on display within archaeology museums. Finally, a case study of an artistic research project, the Museum of Portable Sound, explores a museological object-based approach to the curation of sounds within the archaeology museum, demonstrating how empathic listening between institution and visitor can contribute positively to visitor experience.
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Sounds Beyond Music: Selected Objects From The Museum Of Portable Sound, 2023
The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) is an independent institution currently based in Portsmouth, ... more The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) is an independent institution currently based in Portsmouth, UK dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting sounds as objects. MOPS focuses primarily on non-musical sound because, let's face it, music is the most talked-about form of sound there is – and we feel there's a whole world of sounds beyond music that are just as worthy of everyone's attention. This exhibit at the University of Portsmouth Library [15 November 2023 – 31 January 2024] is drawn from the MOPS Physical Objects Collection, a secondary complement to our primary Permanent Collection of Sounds. MOPS began as a museum that is listened to rather than looked at, and we hope the subjects we've covered here might inspire a curiosity to give attention to sounds in the world around you that you might otherwise ignore.
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(Selected preview) Compiled, written, and designed by John Kannenberg The third edition of the M... more (Selected preview)
Compiled, written, and designed by John Kannenberg
The third edition of the Museum of Portable Sound Gallery Guide expands upon the groundwork of the previous editions, becoming an introductory textbook to the cross-disciplinary culture of sound.
Now including 317 objects subdivided into 30 galleries, every object label and didactic panel is included in the updated Gallery Guide. There are also several galleries covering all-new topics unavailable in previous editions: Humans, Underwater Life, Machines, Fountains, Elevators and Escalators, Railway Stations, and Walks. A greatly expanded number of 'Listening Close-Up' didactic panels broaden the scope of the stories told in each gallery beyond the objects on display, with topics including the invention of the modern microphone, the forgotten history of the wire recorder, a timeline of portable sound technologies, the Doppler Effect, the invention of the stethoscope, the ancient origin of earplugs, and an essay on the links between curiosity and close listening. While the Permanent Collection Galleries focus on digital sound objects, an illustrated catalogue of the museum's Physical Objects Collection further explores the tangible artefacts of sound culture.
Other features new to the 3rd Edition include:
• SOUND: An Extremely Brief Introduction
• Glossary of Sound and Culture Terms
• Revised and expanded Reading List
• Curator's Top 40 Objects Playlist
• #PortableSoundPoll Archive
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The catalogue for a series of exhibitions featuring works generated by a rigorously imprecise dra... more The catalogue for a series of exhibitions featuring works generated by a rigorously imprecise drawing method that metaphorically represents the imperfection embedded within the human experience of the infinite. The exhibition series culminated in a performance, An Hour of Infinity, at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology featuring eight live drawing performers, two musicians improvising to graphic scores based upon museum objects, and two multichannel sound installations that used sounds of the Kelsey Museum as their source material. The catalogue discusses the artist's ideas about the human experience of the infinite as well as the idea of "the active sounds of history," the sounds generated when museum visitors engage sonically with museum objects.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Curator: The Museums Journal, 2019
In the 1991 book Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display, Stephen Greenbl... more In the 1991 book Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display, Stephen Greenblatt introduced the concept of a museological ‘resonance’: the idea that objects on display within a museum exhibition ‘resonate’, or generate new meanings, via their relationships with the visitors who observe and interact with them. This approach to meaning‐making has since impacted greatly upon the strategies museum curators follow when selecting and juxtaposing physical objects. This paper explores how Greenblatt’s notion of museological resonance could be applied to the display of sounds themselves as cultural objects within a museum context. A mixtape or playlist‐inspired approach to constructivist learning is proposed to re‐imagine how sounds might be able to function within traditionally object‐based museum exhibition. Soundmarks – sounds that reoccur within local communities which help to define their unique cultural identity – are presented as a potential area of research and collection by museums, while post‐industrial soundmarks such as traffic signals for the visually impaired and the interface sounds of public transport systems are suggested as deserving of curatorial care via an expanded notion of intangible cultural heritage.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Curator: The Museums Journal (online content), 2019
In this age of digital news and social media, our lives have become portable. The Museum of Porta... more In this age of digital news and social media, our lives have become portable. The Museum of Portable Sound is a reflection on this, being both a sign of the times in its boundary-breaking approach, yet also a catalogue of the way in which sound has been used, experienced and perceived over time since we first were able to record it. This mobile museum was established in November 2015 in London, UK and allows visitors to arrange their experience on a one-to-one basis with the curator, or in small groups at a location and time of their choice. Though portable, the museum has galleries, temporary exhibitions and education programmes. With the museum set to receive its 1,000th visitor any day, I spoke with Director and Chief Curator, John Kannenberg about the development of the museum he has built, how it fosters human connections, and its place within the lexicon of museology and sound art.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Portable Gray, 2019
Philip von Zweck and John Kannenberg met about twenty years ago via the lowercase-sound email lis... more Philip von Zweck and John Kannenberg met about twenty years ago via the lowercase-sound email list and have been discussing sound, music, and sound art ever since. Both artists, von Zweck came to sound art via his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began as a painter and ended up in the Sound Department, while Kannenberg, also trained as a painter, developed an interest in creative sound via his work in multimedia as a Web 1.0 web designer in the 1990s. von Zweck hosted Something Else, a radio program devoted to experimental music and creative sound, on WLUW in Chicago from 1996 to 2010 and has taught sound, radio, art, and related courses at a variety of colleges and universities. Kannenberg was a frequent performer on the show and occasional guest host, all the while running a netlabel dedicated to experimental music, Stasisfield.com. Kannenberg eventually moved to London to pursue a PhD in sound and museum studies with a creative practice centered around his Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS): since 2015, a single mobile phone containing hundreds of his field recordings categorized according to traditional museological notions of culture. It is not available as an app, but rather must be visited in person in a face-to-face meeting to emphasize the social aspect of the museum experience.
The pair recently had a Skype discussion—von Zweck in Chicago, Kannenberg in Portsmouth, UK—to continue their years-long debate over whether sound art is actually a thing, and if so, what its definition should be.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Science Museum Group Journal, 2017
As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum pract... more As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum practice have focused on providing audiences with multisensory experiences. Books such as 2014’s The Multisensory Museum present preliminary strategies by which museums might help visitors engage with collections using senses beyond the visual. In this article, an overview of the multisensory roots of museum display and an exploration of the shifting definition of ‘object’ leads to a discussion of Pierre Schaeffer’s musical term objet sonore – the ‘sound object’, which has traditionally stood for recorded sounds on magnetic tape used as source material for electroacoustic musical composition. A problematic term within sound studies, this article proposes a revised definition of ‘sound object’, shifting it from experimental music into the realm of the author’s own experimental curatorial practice of establishing The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution dedicated to the collection and display of sounds as cultural objects. Utilising Brian Kane’s critique of Schaeffer, Christoph Cox and Casey O’Callaghan’s thoughts on sonic materialism, Dan Novak and Matt Sakakeeny’s anthropological approach to sound theory, and art historian Alexander Nagel’s thoughts on the origins of art forgery, this article presents a new working definition of the sound object as a museological (rather than a musical) concept.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Museological Review No. 20: The Global Microphone, Apr 2016
The multisensory experience of museums is becoming increasingly scrutinised, with many museums be... more The multisensory experience of museums is becoming increasingly scrutinised, with many museums beginning to include participatory activities based on their own soundscapes in their public engagement programs. What are some possible strategies for engaging with a museum soundscape? Could listening to museums lead to the development of a sonically inclusive museology? In my artistic practice, I make sound maps of museums including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, and The Pitt Rivers at Oxford. These sound maps are immersive audio tours juxtaposing sounds in new contexts like museum curators juxtapose objects in exhibitions. I also make blind listening sketches of museum soundscapes using an evolving lexicon of museum sound symbols. In this paper, I contextualise my museum sound mapping strategies within practices of sound arts and other mapping practices, and provide documentation of my results, including sound compositions and drawings that map my acts of listening to museum soundscapes.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A survey of recent and upcoming sound map projects collecting sounds from museums and archives.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Memory is at the heart of much human activity. Memory drives us to collect, to record, to create ... more Memory is at the heart of much human activity. Memory drives us to collect, to record, to create documents –"information or evidence that serves as an official record" – that we then spend a lot of time and effort preserving. Some of these documents are strictly personal and kept as family heirlooms. Others end up being judged by someone else as having a broader significance, and end up being preserved in places like museums and libraries in order that they be made accessible to a wider audience. There are countless institutions around the world whose mission statements may not explicitly express it, but which are essentially dedicated to honoring the human desire to remember.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This practice-based project begins with an exploration of the acoustic environments of a variety ... more This practice-based project begins with an exploration of the acoustic environments of a variety of contemporary museums via field recording and sound mapping. Through a critical listening practice, this mapping leads to a central question: can sounds act as objects analogous to physical objects within museum practice – and if so, what is at stake in creating a museum that only exhibits sounds?
Given the interest in collection and protection of intangible culture within contemporary museum practice, as well as the evolving anthropological view of sound as an object of human culture, this project suggests that a re-definition of Pierre Shaeffer’s oft-debated term ‘sound object’ within the context of museum practice may be of use in reimagining how sounds might be able to function within traditionally object-based museum exhibition practices. Furthermore, the longstanding notion of ‘soundmarks’ – sounds that reoccur within local communities which help to define their unique cultural identity – is explored as a means by which post-industrial sounds such as traffic signals for the visually impaired and those made by public transport, may be considered deserving of protection by museum practitioners.
These ideas are then tested via creative practice by establishing an experimental curatorial project, The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), an institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting sounds as objects of culture and human agency. MOPS displays sounds, collected via the author’s field recording practice, as museological objects that, like the physical objects described by Stephen Greenblatt, ‘resonate’ with the outside world – but also with each other, via their careful selection and sequencing that calls back to the mix tape culture of the late twentieth century.
The unconventional form of MOPS – digital audio files on a single mobile phone accompanied by a museum ‘map’ and Gallery Guide – emphasizes social connections between the virtual and the physical. The project presents a viable format via which sounds may be displayed as culture while also interrogating what a museum can be in the twenty first century.
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Decolonizing Sonic Heritage Spaces: A HEIF-funded Knowledge Exchange Workshop, 2023
In the early 2000s, a group of academics sought to establish sound studies as an academic discipl... more In the early 2000s, a group of academics sought to establish sound studies as an academic discipline analogous to visual culture, a body of work that could interrogate the so-called ‘history of sound’ as a wider cultural study of ‘sound beyond music’ (Mansell, 2021). As sound studies has increasingly been absorbed into the fields of musicology and ‘sound art’, this initial desire to explore sound’s wider cultural connections via historical analysis has struggled to remain at the fore of the discipline as more scholars embrace an attitude of ‘musical exceptionalism’ (Devine, 2019) that confers a greater importance to musicological histories. In following a more ‘traditional’ sound studies approach – beyond just music – the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), a small independent museum in Portsmouth, UK, has attempted to deconstruct accepted histories of sound rooted in 19th century white European and American perspectives. By presenting sounds as museum objects, MOPS uses traditional museological taxonomies to offer visitors ways of thinking about sounds, their histories and auditors, that spotlight unexpected stories of how attitudes supposedly relegated to the past including colonialism, white supremacy, gender inequality, institutionalised racism, and homophobia continue to echo throughout contemporary life to the present day.
References:
Devine, Kyle. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
Mansell, James. ‘Historical Acoustemology: Past, Present, and Future’. Music Research Annual, no. 2 (2021): 1–19.
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A soundmark is a site-specific sound typically generated by an object or a machine that, once not... more A soundmark is a site-specific sound typically generated by an object or a machine that, once noticed, becomes an identifier of a community (Schafer 1994). Industrial heritage typically focuses on the physical and mechanical remains of industry (Douet 2012); yet museum practice has gradually evolved over the past few decades to also embrace intangible cultural heritage – including human-centric oral traditions, social customs, languages, and ceremonies (Alivizatou, 2016). Subsequently, in recent years philosophers have proposed an object-oriented ontology, one that attempts to empathise with the experiences of objects themselves (Bryant 2011). One way to study the experiences of objects is through the sounds that they make; as a phonographer (one who collects field recordings) working in urban environments, I have collected sounds of industry and displayed them within my own institution, The Museum of Portable Sound. This presentation explores how soundmarks might potentially be classified as industrial heritage and/or intangible culture. Via listening to sounds of audio traffic signals and trains from the Museum's Audio Interfaces and Transport galleries, this discussion of the taxonomies and didactic strategies involved in their presentation as museum objects will point towards an expanded notion of intangible cultural heritage that includes mechanical as well as human soundings. In turn, these exhibition strategies may help begin to explore new contexts for multisensory content within the museological display of industrial heritage.
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ISACS17 Resonant Worlds: Sound, Art and Science at ZKM Center for Art & Media Karlsruhe, Germany: 28-30 September, 2017
In the introduction to the book Keywords in Sound (2015), authors David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny ... more In the introduction to the book Keywords in Sound (2015), authors David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny describe a tension existent within their editorial perspective for the book's lexicon of keywords in sound studies. The authors suggest that it is the conflicts between their experiences as musicologists and as anthropologists that have guided them to approach the subject of sound. Anthropology, they suggest, " reframes sound as an object of culture and human agency " (5), which creates a tension with music's lengthy history establishing " systems of sonic production and analysis. " As an artist, curator, and museologist, my own creative practice has moved in the direction of conceptualising sound in the anthropological sense described by Novak and Sakakeeny. This non-musical, culturally-centred perspective on sound merged with my interest in exploring new forms of museum practice, leading me to establish The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) in November 2015. Since then, I have served as the Director and Chief Curator of an institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting sounds as objects of culture and human agency, presenting sounds as museological objects which resonate off each other in a similar manner to the physical objects of conventional museums. MOPS's objects, however, are digital audio files stored on a single mobile phone, disconnected from the Internet or any mobile networks, and must be listened to in person by MOPS visitors – deliberately, no audio files are distributed online, and there is no app to download. Visits to the Museum are usually conducted on an individual basis, with myself meeting the visitor and presenting them with the mobile phone, a map of the Museum's galleries, and a printed Gallery Guide book containing supporting didactic texts, transforming the Museum visit into a performative, ritualistic experience similar to those discussed by museologist Carol Duncan, but with a shifting of the usual museum power structure: MOPS visitors are offered a private audience with the Director at every visit, allowing them the opportunity for critical dialogue with the institution itself. After more than five hundred visits, this paper will present my preliminary findings from this experiment, focusing on sound's potential as the basis for a new, museological sound object-based curatorial practice beyond architecture that brings the culture of sound to the world, one listener at a time.
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As the multisensory experience of museums continues to become an increasing concern for museum pr... more As the multisensory experience of museums continues to become an increasing concern for museum professionals, my research focuses on increasing awareness of the sonic component of the museum experience. To this end, I have established The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution consisting of audio files on a mobile phone, which can present its collections to the listening public anywhere. This 21st century version of André Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’ explores the culture of listening within a museological context, as well as the experience of listening to a museum itself, as its exhibitions contain (among other things) recordings of sound-related technology and recordings of museum soundscapes from around the world. This presentation will explore the philosophical underpinnings of The Museum of Portable Sound, including my desire to reclaim the term ‘sound object’ from 20th century composer Pierre Schaeffer – who established the term to refer to recorded sounds as a source for musical composition – adjusting its meaning to function instead within museology, allowing ‘sound object’ to refer to any material that is or produces sound that may be collected, interpreted, and exhibited as an object within a museum context. This reclaiming is accomplished via Derrida’s notion of the paleonomy, the adjustment of an old term’s meaning that allows for its use in establishing a new notion; in this case, it is my hope to use this new definition for ‘sound object’ to propose to the museum community that sound may be collected much like the visual or physical objects they are already accustomed to, and also to consider how the public exhibition of sonic objects might allow a museum’s soundscape to assist in fulfilling the tenets of its mission of engagement with their audience.
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Artist statement discussing the process and philosophy behind an hour-long soundscape composition... more Artist statement discussing the process and philosophy behind an hour-long soundscape composition created using field recordings made at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during April and May 2010. The piece has since been released on compact disc and presented as a sound installation at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology's 2011 conference in Corfu, Greece.
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What makes up the afterlife of an exhibition? How do exhibition catalogues relate to the exhibiti... more What makes up the afterlife of an exhibition? How do exhibition catalogues relate to the exhibition experience? If we display 3-D printed copies of artefacts, can they still find ways to resonate as 'authentic' with audiences? Does the sound of an exhibition space ever echo what is on visual display there?
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The text of a public talk given at the National Gallery, London, on 4 September 2015, as part of ... more The text of a public talk given at the National Gallery, London, on 4 September 2015, as part of the Soundscapes Late event, this talk discusses the sonic experience of museums – what museums sound like, as well as what visitors can bring to their own sonic experience of museums through the process of phonomnesis.
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Hours of Infinity is an ongoing project that seeks to record the “imperfect Eternal” – the human ... more Hours of Infinity is an ongoing project that seeks to record the “imperfect Eternal” – the human experience of the infinite, with all its flaws. A rigorously imprecise drawing method is at work in the three projects documented here, leading to visual objects that are uneven, absurd, and fragile symbols for something believed to be symmetrical, profound and everlasting. This MFA thesis documents the images, sounds, video, and performance event created thus far for Hours of Infinity. It also discusses the artistic, philosophical, and textual influences that fed directly into the creation of the work.
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Within this document I examine personal accounts and relevant research surrounding social inadequ... more Within this document I examine personal accounts and relevant research surrounding social inadequacy, freaks, the sideshow, bullying, and school violence. I aim to draw parallels between those who are mar-ginalized by society, and humanity’s underlying fear of vulnerability and death. My thesis project, Red Blob Massacre, brings these ideas into the context of a silent horror film combined with live performance. I discuss the process of my project as a reflection of these issues, and offer a conclusion that ruminates on art as a medium for advocating tolerance and the celebration of human differences.
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Science Museum Group Journal, 2021
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In February, March and April, 2015, the Science Museum, in partnership with the Royal College of ... more In February, March and April, 2015, the Science Museum, in partnership with the Royal College of Music and Nottingham University, organised three, two-day workshops, bringing together fifty-three researchers, writers, musicians and acousticians from across the U.K., Europe and North America. A full list of participants is giving in Appendix A. The aim was to examine music and sound in relation to science and technology within the context of sonic modernity, at the same time exploring the structure and outline of a new touring exhibition around the theme of science and music. The participants were asked to consider how the cultural and historical categories of music, noise and silence could be used to structure the proposed exhibition, in the light of recent work in sound studies, musicology and history of science and technology. The involvement of leading researchers and practitioners in the development of content and narrative for the proposed exhibition brought about up-todate, ri...
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Museum of Portable Sound Press, 2021
What kind of research goes into the design, creation, and maintenance of a museum dedicated to th... more What kind of research goes into the design, creation, and maintenance of a museum dedicated to the culture and history of sound? Now’s your chance to find out, as we unlock our Research Library and present the Museum of Portable Sound Research Library Catalogue: 1,400 books, articles, patents, manuals, audio recordings, and more – including links to those available online – organised into over 50 subject areas. These are the items we have collected so far for our own reference since our museum opened in November 2015, and cover a diverse range of cross-disciplinary topics from the worlds of sound studies, museum studies, and beyond.
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