Science Museum Group Journal Issue 7
Science Museum Group Journal Issue 7
Science Museum Group Journal Issue 7
Issue 07 of the Journal collects scholarly articles from research related to sound and vision from across the Group. Several of these focus on sound and visual elements within collections, most of which are in store rather than on display. James Mooney, for example, discusses sound objects in the collection of composer Hugh Davies, while Joanne Gooding looks at a collection of NHS glasses through the lens of design. Melissa Dickson’s article takes a single historical object – the Ammoniaphone – and looks at how contemporary claims for its effectiveness tell us much about Victorian thinking about science and the voice. Many of these articles (and the Sound and Vision theme) came out of the inaugural Research Conference in September 2016. They are in part published now to mark the re-launch of the newly named Science and Media Museum in March. Director Jo Quinton-Tulloch introduces the issue and rightly draws attention to the importance of the Journal in discussing the relationship between museums and institutional practice and culture and society. Several articles address this historically – for example, Jennifer Rich on the history of how the Science Museum has used sound in interpreting exhibits. But the issue also reflects on more recent developments with articles by Elizabeth Edwards, Ben Burbridge and Michael Terwey providing different perspectives on the move to a more STEM-focused approach at the Science and Media Museum in Bradford.
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Item type:Journal article, Location, location: a polemic on photographs and institutional practices(2017-04-19)Edwards, Elizabeth - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Journal article, The Hugh Davies Collection: live electronic music and self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments, 1967–1975(2017-04-19)Mooney, JamesThe Hugh Davies Collection (HDC) at the Science Museum in London comprises 42 items of electronic sound apparatus owned by English experimental musician Hugh Davies (1943–2005), including self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments and modified sound production and manipulation hardware. An early proponent of ‘live electronic music’ (performed live on stage rather than constructed on magnetic tape in a studio), Davies’s DIY approach shaped the development of experimental and improvised musics from the late 1960s onwards. However, his practice has not been widely reported in the literature, hence little information is readily available about the material artefacts that constituted and enabled it. This article provides the first account of the development of Davies’s practice in relation to the objects in the HDC: from the modified electronic sound apparatus used in his early live electronic compositions (among the first of their kind by a British composer); through the ‘instrumental turn’ represented by his first self-built instrument, Shozyg I (1968); to his mature practice, where self-built instruments like Springboard Mk. XI (1974) replaced electronic transformation as the primary means by which Davies explored new and novel sound-worlds. As well as advancing knowledge of Davies’s pioneering work in live electronics and instrument-building and enhancing understanding of the objects in the HDC, this article shows how object biographic and archival methodologies can be combined to provide insight into the ways in which objects (instruments, technologies) and practices shape each other over time. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Journal article, Philip Carpenter and the convergence of science and entertainment in the early-nineteenth century instrument trade(2017-04-19)Roberts, PhillipThis article will consider the alignment of scientific and media practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over several decades after 1817 certain instrument makers began to specialise in the domestic entertainment market, transferring skills from optical instrument manufacture to the design of fashionable novelty devices. The instrument trade was expanding into a new middle-class market to exploit an increasing popular trade in optical novelties, exemplified by the 1817 Kaleidoscope craze and new interest among the middle classes for microscopes, telescopes, and magic lanterns. This paper will address this shift towards more popular uses of scientific instruments and optical toys. In particular it will address the involvement of the Birmingham and London optician Philip Carpenter in three popular media formats of the 1810s and 1820s — the 1817 patent Kaleidoscope, 1821 Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern and 1827 Microcosm. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Journal article, Rather unspectacular: design choices in National Health Service glasses(2017-04-19)Gooding, JoanneThis article considers the design and production of spectacles in Britain following the introduction of standardised frame styles under the National Health Service. NHS spectacles were provided as a functional, durable medical appliance to be delivered cost-effectively and there was no explicit concern for fashion or the patient experience. The actions of the government and professional bodies greatly affected the trade in eyewear and thus restricted opportunities for innovative design and consumer choice. Within the range of state regulation frames there was no active concern for ‘design’ in terms of appearance and it was only through the purchase of private frames that significant choice and variety in eyewear could be attained. The scope for the public to select a more fashionable frame whilst receiving an element of state aid was through the purchase of NHS hybrid private frames. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Journal article, Moments of danger: photography, institutions and the history of the future(2017-04-19)Burbridge, Benedict1 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
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Item type:Journal article, Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat’s Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing(2017-04-19)Dickson, MelissaIn January 1885, the Glaswegian Professor of Chemistry Dr Robert Carter Moffat organised a special operatic concert at St James’s Hall, London, to which he invited around two thousand scientists and musicians. The point of this invitation concert was that all the singers used bottled air. Moffat himself appeared between the various performances, wielding his mysterious Ammoniaphone, or bottled-air machine, a long silver tube which he flourished in the faces of his audience while describing its virtues with considerable animation. The premise of the Ammoniaphone was that since Italian opera singers were known throughout the world for the beauty of their voices, it stood to reason that this must have something to do with the quality of the air they breathed. The Ammoniaphone, Moffat claimed, contained the precise chemical formula of the air in Southern Italy, and inhaling from this instrument effectively resulted in the ‘Italianization of the voice’. Drawing on representations of the Ammoniaphone across nineteenth-century advertising and the medical and musical press, and situating these representations within the broader Victorian fascination with the supremacy of Italian opera singers, this essay offers new insight into the emergent corporeal anxieties betrayed by late nineteenth-century consumer culture, and the various methods by which the body might be continually fashioned and re-fashioned in order to produce a high-functioning social subject in a fast-paced modern society. Aggressively (not to say unscrupulously) advertised, the Ammoniaphone was marketed to vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, choirmasters, schoolmasters, parliamentarians, and enthusiastic amateurs of these vocations, with claims that it would conserve and preserve the voice, expand its range upwards and downwards, and lend it an otherwise unobtainable purity, beauty and richness. This, I will argue, was symptomatic of a broader cultural need to counter the stresses and strains of modern life, and to wreak some kind of evolutionary advantage through artificial intervention. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
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