Museum Sound Maps

As part of my artistic practice, one of my ongoing projects since 2010 has been the creation of detailed sound maps of specific museums. Rather than follow the now-ubiquitous online click-to-listen format of Google Maps API-based sound maps (which foreground a visual interface rather than an auditory experience, and as such are, in my view, antithetical to the very notion of a practice calling itself sound mapping), my museum sound maps are constructed as linear sound compositions closer in form to the sound maps of rivers made by sound artist and composer Annea Lockwood. My maps are meant to be experienced as pure audio, as the results of a process of personal artistic cartography, instead of an online archive of sounds attached to visual maps. As my sound mapping practice has evolved, I have allowed myself to become more of an audible presence or character within the maps, performing my own auditory relationship with each museum space. 

Two of the completed maps have been released on CD: A Sound Map of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo and A Sound Map of the Art Institute of Chicago. I have composed further maps of the British Library Sound Archive, Tate Modern, and the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum, all of which can be heard excerpted below and will eventually be released in their entirety. Maps of the Pitt Rivers museum at Oxford and the Science Museum in London are currently in progress.

• Gallery Whispers and Lunch in the Cafe: Mapping Museums Through Their Sounds, featured  on Hyperallergic.com

During a five-week stay in Egypt in April and May 2010, I devoted four days to recording the sounds present inside and outside the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, resulting in the eight hours of material from which this composition has been created. As a cultural institution, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo represents one of the foundations of human history; as a soundscape, it represents an unexpectedly rich sonic experience with its own place in the history of a country now in transition. More information about the project at http://johnkannenberg.com/sound/EgyptianMuseum.html

An excerpt from my ongoing series of sound maps of museums, this brief movement through the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing traces a path from the Millennium Park entrance on the museum's third floor through the Griffin Court on the ground floor, then back up to the second floor for lunch at Caffè Moderne.

While collecting field recordings for A Sound Map of Tate Modern in October 2014, I walked around every open gallery space and recorded myself stepping on all of the floor ventilators in order to find the wobbly ones that made noise. This montage contains all 39 wobbly floor ventilators in order of discovery. Headphone listening recommended.

As one walks through a place like the Enlightenment Gallery in London, it becomes apparent that, although the budding museologists of the Enlightenment Era tried their best to be 'universal' in their choice of what to collect and categorise, there are important objects missing there, there are important voices missing there. Categorising culture leads to as many omissions as it does inclusions. When I decided to make a sound map of the Enlightenment Galleries at the British Museum, I knew that I would have to echo this idea of omission within the structure of the map itself. I recorded the Enlightenment Gallery for an entire day, recording one hour of continuous sound in each of the seven sections of the gallery. Each of these hour-long recordings was then time compressed into seven minutes, without changing the pitch or applying any effects. The result is a 49 minute piece of echoes – tiny samples of the original sounds, whipping by the listener in fleeting glances, sometimes registering, sometimes not. The majority of the original sonic events are lost, yet they are all still there somehow as well, like ghosts. We hear echoes of voices, of footsteps, of security guards’ walkie-talkies, of keys being rattled – sonic events easily associated with a visit to a museum, yet presented in an extracted, possibly more haunting, form. In this excerpt from the completed 49 minute sound map, the listener is presented with an approximation of an experience, an analog to the fate of museum objects: things taken out of both their time and their original context, and re-presented as an echo of what they once were, all of their physicality there, lacking their original voice.