Exploring Sonic Cultural Heritage

Register for the conference here

Today we experience a ‘sonic turn’ in museums. Sound enters the museum experience in new and more ubiquitous ways: we move through designed soundscapes, listen to intimate in-ear narrations and engage in noisy spectacles. At times sounds take centre stage and appear as ‘displayed objects’: as music, as radio, as art – and even as everyday soundscapes documenting the sensory conditions of past lives. But do we fully understand the implications of sound as heritage? Do we know what to preserve and how to preserve it? Do we have the tools and methods necessary to make sounds of the past audible to listeners of the future? And are we confident with the conceptual and theoretical implications of approaching the past as sound?

For more than a century now, sound has emerged as a heritage issue. The incentive to preserve voices, dialects, singing and music is as old as recording technology itself, and many societies have now built impressive collections of music, radio, soundscapes etc. The past becomes ever more audible. Yet, approaching sonic cultural heritage involves having attention not only to stored objects, but to intricate interplays between material and immaterial culture, between the tangible and the intangible, between recorded sounds and evasive listening practises, between outdated technologies and the listening experiences these technologies generated. Sonic cultural heritage must be conceived as an interplay between preserved objects and the practices through which these became significant. But how do we approach and built archives to account for sonic pasts? How might we search for past sounds and listening situations? and how could we convey this to museum visitors?

This conference is initiated by the new National Knowledge Center for Sonic Cultural Heritage and set in the City of Sound, Struer, Denmark to facilitate the local, national and international development of the field. It explores the concept of sonic heritage: the ideologies and myths embedded, the discourses surrounding, the ambiguities within the idea of preserving sound, and the problems faced when delimiting a space, a territory or a group to whom a certain heritage belong. The conference sets out to unravel the conceptual and theoretical foundation for sonic cultural heritage, and to demonstrate the options and perspectives for a history of sound.

Confirmed speakers are:

• James Mansell - Professor of Cultural History and Sound Studies, University of Nottingham & Science Museum Group UK
• Kerstin Klenke - Head of Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Science
• Jakob Parby - Senior Researcher and Curator, Museum of Copenhagen. Sound and aurality
• Heikki Uimonen - Research Director & Docent, University of Eastern Finland & Meri Kytö - Lecturer at the University of Turku and Associate Professor, University of Eastern Finland
• Mariana J. Lopez - Professor in Sound Production and Post Production, University of York

The conference will be held at Folkets Hus in Struer and will be in English.

The conference wil take place during the Struer Tracks biennnial for sound and listening. Please visit the Struer Tracks webside for information about the extensive program of concerts, installations, workshops, seminars and other events taking place in Struer 14-16 August.