Dr John Kannenberg, Curator of the Museum of Portable Sound, will be giving a public talk on his latest exhibition featuring physical objects from the Museum. John will explore topics from aural diversity to developing communication products, and from natural sounds to human languages. This is a talk with something to interest everyone!
This talk was postponed and is now happening in the University Library at 5.30 pm on Thursday 8 February.
This event is free and open to the public. If you do not have a university card, please arrive at the Library Reception by 5.15 pm and bring a photographic ID.
An Introduction to The Museum of Portable Sound
I'm John Kenberg, I'm an artist a researcher and the director and chief curator of the Museum of Portable Sound, which is a local Museum here in Portsmouth. The Museum of Portable Sound opened originally in London in 2015 and the museum itself is a collection of sounds that only exist on a single iPhone, and in order for people to visit the museum, they have to meet with me personally and listen to the sounds on my phone. The sounds are organised using sorts of themes and taxonomies that museums have always used to classify physical objects in the physical world, and I've applied those same themes to sounds. So there's a floor of Natural History, Science and Technology, architecture and Urban Design, and art and culture.
And over here we have some of the sounds that are in the Museum's collection, there are six sounds from each of the four floors. Most of the recordings in the Museum's collection are things that I've recorded myself, although more and more I've been including things recorded or created by other people. Such as the Natural History floor now has a sound made by the first organism on Earth to make sound, and this was a sound reconstruction that was made by David George Haskell, who recently wrote a book called Sounds Wild and Broken. And as part of his research for that book, he created this reconstruction of the sounds that would have been made by a fossil of an insect that makes sound very similar to the way a cricket does now. On the Science and Technology floor, there's an extensive Gallery dedicated to the history of audio recording. So we have the first recording of a human voice, which was made in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison by a Frenchman named Edward Leon Scott de Martinville. Also in the Laboratories in Medicine Gallery, we have the sound of me receiving a root canal, Allso there's a new astronomy Gap Gallery and that includes a sound of flying through the rings of Saturn, which was recorded by the Hyan Cassini probe in 2016.
On the architecture and Urban Design floor, one of the most popular sounds in the Museum's collection is the sound of Sigman Freud's toilet, which is the sound of his toilet at his home in Vienna, not the home in London. I've recorded both of them but the one in London doesn't really sound like Sigman Freud's toilet should sound, but the one in Vienna certainly does. On the fourth floor, the art and culture floor one of the recordings I have is a recording I made of the Sistine Chapel. Which if anyone hasn't been to the Sistine Chapel you might expect it to be a silent place of contemplation, it is anything but. Usually, it's filled with tourists who can't stop talking about what they're looking at and guards who really want the people to shut up and all the guards do is yell the word silence over and over again, and at one point when I was visiting they did it over a PA system, so you can see these peaks in the waveform here are a gallery guard over a PA system in the middle of the Sistine Chapel yelling the word silence.
This poster is for one of the projects in the museum that's ongoing, this is our only crowdsourced project at the moment. This is a project called Alphabets and the Sonic building blocks of language, and for this project, I've been asking people to just record themselves like on their phone just a voice message a simple very simple recording of themselves reciting the alphabet of their native language or the writing system, that they use for their native native language. And so far we have over 40 recordings something in the range of 35 to 40 different languages, but there are a lot of languages left in the world that we haven't even scratched the surface of. So this poster has a QR code asking people if they'd like to contribute one of the languages that we don't have they can just scan this QR code and send a voice memo to a Google form that I've set up for the museum and some of the this is a list of some of the languages that, we don't currently have we're really lacking languages from Africa Asia indigenous Australia and Native America so if anyone knows anyone who speaks zosa or Cherokee please pass this along to them.