Salomé Voegelin and Mark Wright presented ‘Auscultating Museological Bodies and Spaces’ at "Sound Instruments and Sonic Cultures", an interdisciplinary conference that xplored the relationships between sound instruments and sonic cultures. Hosted by the Science and Media Museum (UK), the Film and Q&A were part of the session "Institutes and Memory" chaired by Tim Boon.
Auscultating Museological Bodies and Spaces
Abstract
This presentation will reflect on the use of listening instruments and methods within science and social science, and speculate on how such technology and praxis could generate novel approaches to listening in the museum’s context. We will share research from our UK research council (AHRC) funded project ‘Listening Across Disciplines II’, which investigates different methodologies and technologies of listening, in order to bring them to the environment and institution of the museum. We aim to debate what such instruments and methods from different disciplines could bring, as technologies, as imagination and as skill to how we curate and install works in a museum, and how we promote a sonic engagement in its collections and artefacts. For example, we will reflect on the stethoscope and its use within respiratory auscultation: a method for transducing the sounds of lungs, and debate how its intimate way of encountering, extending and understanding lungs, could offer a museological sonic imagination; and we will consider the application of listening methods in urban studies to reflect on their potential to engage in the museum as a sonic environment that could be differently sounded and performed in curation.