The Auckland War Memorial Museum is one of my favourite places in the world. It’s an amazing building full of everything you’d like a museum to be. Interesting and engaging, but at the same time hushed, marbled and reverent.
And while it’s appropriately austere, it’s also forward-looking. They’ve recently had a major refurbishment, introduced some really clever digital and interactive features, but without turning it into some sort of crass, multimedia theme park.
As far as I’m concerned, they’ve pretty much struck the balance about right – and the last time I was back in NZ, I was delighted to be able to go to whole new sections of the museum in their new extension.
But the reason I’m talking about this here on New Music Strategies is that they’ve done something really clever that I’d love to see replicated in other ways elsewhere. Perhaps you agree.
My museum
Image courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum
Now, of course – I have a special affinity for this place. To a large extent, it’s my own culture and heritage in that building. Before we moved to the UK, I lived just a couple of minutes walk away, and I used to cycle past this site every day as I rode with my son Jake to his primary school.
But even if you don’t have the same connection, there’s a lesson here.
Auckland Museum have collaborated with some New Zealand musicians to create a series of soundtracks for the different sections of the museum, and called it Sonic Museum.
Music for spaces
Popular dub artist Tiki Taane has brilliantly mixed contemporary and ancient themes for the Maori Court; electronic jazzer Nathan Haines evokes the undersea experience for the Oceans Gallery; songwriter Don McGlashan’s soundscape for the Origins Gallery is beautiful; Rachel Shearer’s Journey from the Centre of the Earth is an amazing and brain-altering piece of sonic art; and Phil Dadson is, as ever, a marvel.
And so on.
It’s clever stuff – a beautiful record. But it’s designed to be listened to on headphones as a part of the experience of the museum itself.
Now, of course, this is not the only museum in the world. Nor are museums the only sort of public spaces that would work well with this kind of treatment. You may be able to think of ways to connect with something meaningful in your own town.
But go have a look, and if you’re inclined – download and have a listen. It’s really brilliant stuff.
Maybe it’ll inspire you to think of other uses and other avenues for the music that you make.
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[...] dubber 12:29 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply Tags: media, perception, space, time I’ve been listening to Sonic Museum today, and blogged about it at New Music Strategies. [...]
[...] ● Aukland Museum Invites Musicians to Score Its Collections (aucklandmuseum.com): The Aukland Museum brought in composer-performers to produce original music for the institution’s major exhibit spaces. Samples of each of the tracks are available online. Participants include Tiki Taane, Tim Coster, Don McGlashan, Richard Francis, Rachel Shearer, Phil Dadson, Chris Adams, Rosy Parlane, and Nathan Haines. (Via newmusicstrategies.com.) [...]
5 Comments
Thanks for that, Andrew. I spent some time in that museum with my family when we we spent a few days in New Zealand once, and we were all very moved by the experience. I’m a huge fan of Don McGlashan so it’s always nice to hear anything that he’s involved with, and the whole project sounds interesting. As “rock” people we often forget that music is used in many different ways outside the normal rock and roll paradigm of bands, gigs, albums.
I’m going to be presenting a panel at Un-Convention on that very topic: Outside The Box
Aha! I checked out the link to that “Outside The Box” site and it looks like an interesting discussion will be taking place. In fact it applies deeply to the likes of me, because even though I play music that fits into the “rock/pop” category, I don’t (at present) play live for various reasons. So I don’t have the option of selling CDs at gigs or building up a following that way. I have become a bit of an expert at making fans/friends using social networking alone, but there’s still a wall that you hit by not playing live.
Will the “Outside The Box” discussion be available in any form for those of us who can’t make it to the actual event?
It’s a great museum to visit.
Hi Andrew, many thanks for the post. We’ve had great feedback and everyone is enthused about what the project signals for Auckland Museum.
Sonic Museum is part of a larger movement to explore how people can have different kinds of experiences in our galleries. Music and sonic compositions can and do change the way people move and see in a gallery space. Of course personal/portable music alters the way we feel and think about what we see around us – whether we’re on the way to work or walking through the park – but Sonic Museum takes this a step further with compositions that interpret the stories and objects in the gallery. And because music inspires an emotional response, these compositions give our visitors an opportunity to engage with the galleries through their senses, rather than their intellect. We also chose to work with a wide spectrum of artists – and that was interesting in itself – the sound artists’ interpretations are of course quite different from the those of the ‘popular’ artists – yet all in their own way have opened up a new point of access for our visitors.
Thanks again for your post- it was a fantastic project to work on.
Amanda White, Exhibition Developer, Auckland Museum