Music, Noise and Silence

Music, Noise and Silence

In 1935, the Science Museum staged a temporary exhibition on the theme of noise abatement. During this period, noise was seen as a by-product of industrial modernity that needed to be tackled by new silent technologies and measuring devices, and so the exhibition was planned. To celebrate the 80th anniversary of this exhibition in 2015, the museum organised three workshops in conjunction with the Royal College of Music and the University of Nottingham. Concentrating on the relations between music, noise and silence, these workshops convened our community of curators, musicians and historians of technology to discuss how we should display musical topics in future exhibitions in a way that takes into account the roles of noise and music in Modernity. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The outputs of the Music, Noise and Silence project are available to view and download here.
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    Item type:Leaflet,
    Music and Noise programme
    (2024)
    Science Museum Group
    This leaflet was handed out during the final workshop titled 'Music and Noise', held at the Science Museum from 23 to 24 April 2015. It explored how the boundary between music and noise is policed. This workshop also included a summative session for the whole series.
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    Item type:Leaflet,
    Silence and Music programme
    (2024)
    Science Museum Group
    In 1935, the Science Museum staged a very uncharacteristic temporary exhibition, on the theme of noise abatement. The Museum’s exhibitions in those days usually celebrated new technologies, such as television (in 1937) or showed unfamiliar parts of its collections, for example ‘rafts, canoes and boats’ (1931). But noise was seen as a by-product of industrial modernity that needed to be tackled, not least by new silent technologies and measuring devices, and so the exhibition was planned. To celebrate the 80th anniversary of this exhibition, and as part of the research towards a future exhibition on science, technology and music, the museum has organised a series of events, organised around the themes of ‘Music, Noise and Silence’. The series, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is being developed in conjunction with the Royal College of Music and the University of Nottingham. Each workshop includes publicly-accessible concerts and talks by high profile speakers. On February 25-26 at the Royal College of Music, we explore Silence and Music, starting from the idea that silence is the ‘absolute zero’ of both music and the science of acoustics. The conversations will discuss the proposition that modern ‘quiet’ musics – including experimental, ambient and spiritual genres – are responses to industrial modernity.
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    Item type:Leaflet,
    Noise and Silence programme
    (2024)
    Science Museum Group
    This leaflet was handed out during the second workshop titled 'Noise and Silence', held at Nottingham University from 26 to 27 March 2015. It explored the sonic cultural context of industrial modernity which made noise an issue before, during and after the interwar period, and which saw the Science Museum hosting the noise abatement exhibition in 1935. The workshop asked when and how the noise of modernity became a significant issue; the circumstances under which science made noise a subject of scientific research and the broader relationship of the work on noise to the development of the science of acoustics.