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A Sound Map of the Enlightenment Galleries at the British Museum

by John Kannenberg

supported by
William Denton
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Richard Finlay Fletcher
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wyskeu
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genekjr
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gilcasanova
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/
1.
Hour 1: The Natural World 07:00
2.
Hour 2: The Birth of Archaeology 07:00
3.
Hour 3: Art and Civilisation 07:00
4.
Hour 4: Classifying the World 07:00
5.
Hour 5: Ancient Scripts 07:00
6.
Hour 6: Religion and Ritual 07:00
7.
Hour 7: Trade and Discovery 07:00

about

PLEASE NOTE: The PDF liner notes included here are also available as a printed book from the Museum of Portable Sound Press. If you would like the printed book as well as all of the digital content available here, purchase the book at the link below, following the directions there to obtain a link to a free download of this album.

GET THE PRINTED BOOK + DIGITAL ALBUM AT THIS LINK:

www.blurb.co.uk/b/8656036-hearing-enlightenment

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.

credits

released May 30, 2018

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all rights reserved

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John Kannenberg London, UK

Sound maps, field recordings, conceptual drones.

Director and Chief Curator of The Museum of Portable Sound.

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