Hear, Here

When we first received the proposal from Kathleen Weins and Eric de Visscher for this special issue, it coincided with a presentation by my colleague, environmental psychologist Arline Bronzaft, on her career as an environmental psychologist. Arline has been studying noise pollution, the unwanted sonic experience in cities, for the past forty-five years. She brought to our attention the realization that sound rises to a level of political concern when public officials understand the adverse impact of loud sounds and noise to hearing and overall health. She told me that noise tends to be a low priority for policymakers, noting that in 1982, the Reagan administration in the USA defunded the Office of Noise Abatement and Control with little outcry. Possibly, the closing was accepted because there were not enough studies then to support the deleterious impacts of noise on health at that time. Today the research linking noise to adverse health effects is strong. Arline encouraged us to take this topic seriously and to pursue the special issue. At her prompting we are now pleased to present this special issue, and to use our platform to encourage our next generation of leaders to take on the battle cry for change, while they still have the capacity to hear the problem in and around our museums. With that in mind, I did a quick assessment of our journal’s history to see how well the topic had been covered in the past. With sixty-two years of publishing under our belts, there were only seven papers that focused directly on the sound experience in our archives. Certainly, I found the topic personally exciting and the lack of material in our archives troubling. Early in my career I studied how variation in zoo exhibit design might be implicated in breeding success for endangered species. We focused on four different species that were housed in over 50 zoos across the United States and Canada. After a rather arduous effort to record over 56 physical parameters in each location to see if we could identify physical variations in exhibits that might impact animals, we had a few unexpected surprises. For black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornus), we discovered that enclosures with hard surfaced walls were more likely to produce undifferentiated low frequency reverberating sounds that correlated directly with higher female aggression and lower levels of breeding success (Carlstead et al. 1999). Around that same time, I was also part of a rather exciting study of aggressive construction noise abatement from deep tunnel blasting for a light rail system and whether that sound attenuation was sufficient to avoid impact on zoo animal wellbeing (Brinkerhoff 1995; Fraser et al. 2000). Turned out that it wasn’t such a big deal, despite how closely we monitored the animals. Animals were still vigilant, likely feeling the vibrations. The elephants exhibited a bit of alarm, the trout dropped to the bottom of their tanks, and some fecal samples from two endangered spotted owls demonstrated high levels of stress. But overall, it seemed that being aggressive with the construction team and requiring high levels of sound management paid off. Since that time, I’ve been very attentive to how sound might also implicated in visitor experience, raising tension, creating frustration, or simply inhibiting the full experience of what’s possible in a museum. For a long time now, it seems that few museum professionals really felt the urge to make the subject a priority. At this writing, I stand corrected. It seems that over the past two decades, the field’s interests are changing. Wiens and de Visscher’s proposal for a special Curator issue had all the right components to thoroughly explore sonic experiences in museums. Their work helped us learn that many people around the world were working on the topic, even if it was hard to draw attention to the work. We held our breath and hoped that when we made the call for papers, we’d receive 10 good manuscripts to build an issue around. Beyond our wildest expectations, we received 37 great proposals, many more than we could possibly publish. As an editorial team, we looked across the submissions to select papers that could broadly describe the diversity of experiments. The result is 18 interesting ways of thinking about the auditory dimensions of the museum field. In their guest editorial, Wiens and de Visscher offer their perspectives on the value of this area of study and how they feel this special issue of Curator is a call to action. As Editor for this journal, I am proud to say that we have substantially added to the resources now available to museum workers as foundational material for their work. To support readers of this timely topic, we have worked with our publisher to make seven of the articles from the journal’s archive open access from July to December 2019. These five papers and two exhibition reviews suggest that at least a few researchers have been listening intently for nearly fifty years. The earliest paper in our archive (Gold 1971) offered readers a narrative approach to curatorial efforts to support the display of musical instruments. That paper coincided with the renewed interest in ancient musical instruments and the sound they made. Gold called for more attention to the sounds and experience of the instrument as something to be manipulated rather than admired for its appearance. In the 1980s, at a time of rapid growth in digital innovations, two manuscripts in our archive demonstrated the willingness of museum professionals to experiment with the affordances of sonic technology. Kerr (1984) offered insight into the creation of an authentic soundscape to match a regional exhibition story, while McVey et al. (1989) presented a more technical paper on how curators might invest in sound recording as an aspect of collections development. The mid-1990s, around the time my own interest in the sound experience at zoos was getting underway, another group in the zoo community explored how natural soundscapes had impact on visitors (Ogden et al. 1993). Around the same time, an exhibition review touched on the memorializing of the Motown sound and culture in a museum exhibition (Moore 1995). It would be nearly a decade before the direct focus of sound appeared again Curator, with Finkel’s (2004) work on sound and light, and the 2010 exhibition review that lauded the experiments at the Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (Marsh 2010). Today, this special double issue of Curator seeks to bring to the attention of museum leaders the value of listening to our museums. Museums may be more focused on listening to their visitors, but the papers on the following pages suggest that we have a long way to go to ensure that all senses are considered an essential part of all museum experiences. It’s high time we listened to our museums, considered them as musical instruments that can support meaning making, and curated that experience with the same intensity as we bring to the visual field. Or rather, as I titled this editorial, it’s time for museums to focus on what and how we hear, here. John Fraser, Editor (jfraser@newknowledge.org). John Fraser is President & CEO of New Knowledge Organization Ltd. and 2018–2019 President of the Society for Environmental, Population, & Conservation Psychology, Division 34 of the American Psychological Association.

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