Science Museum Group Journal Issue 8
Science Museum Group Journal Issue 8
Science Museum Group Journal Issue 8
Issue 08 is supersized. This is partly due to a rare collection of papers gathered under a Museums theme. These are authored by senior curators and museum directors (Dirk Van Delft, Peter Donhauser, Martha Fleming, Jennifer Landry and Robert Bud) who were involved in experimental responses to a perceived crisis in science museums at the turn of this century. In other articles, Charlotte Sleigh looks at the cultural history of the wireless through a work by science-fiction author E C Large, and Barry Murnane et al use a study of Dr Nelson’s Inhaler to explore the growth of inhalation therapy in the mid-nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Sophie Goggins et al return to museum practice by considering how museums display prosthetics. The issue also includes three articles by entrants to the Journal’s first annual writing competition for early career scholars: John Kannenberg, Joshua Butt, and Jean-Francois Fava-Verde. And it presents an experimental type of article – ‘Reflections on Research’ (see Tim Boon et al). But issue 08 starts and finishes with articles questioning the nature of modern scholarship and scholarly publication. In his Editorial, Justin Dillon considers what open-access journals can do to encourage generous scholarship, while the Journal'snew Reviews Editor, Geoff Belknap, asks what readers want from a modern reviews section.
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Item type:Journal article, Towards a more sonically inclusive museum practice: a new definition of the ‘sound object’(2017-11-15)Kannenberg, JohnAs 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.