Decolonising Sonic Heritage Spaces

Knowledge Exchange Workshop, City, University of London

London, 19 June 2023—Our Director has participated in the Decolonising Sonic Heritage Spaces knowledge exchange workshop at City, University of London convened by Dr Maria Mendonça (Kenyon College, US/City) and Professor Laudan Nooshin (City).

His morning presentation, Sound Studies as a Museum Decolonisation Methodology, discussed four examples of how our museum has attempted to foreground alternative histories of sound:

ABSTRACT: In the early 2000s, a group of academics sought to establish sound studies as an academic discipline analogous to visual culture, a body of work that could interrogate the so-called ‘history of sound’ as a wider cultural study of ‘sound beyond music’ (Mansell, 2021). As sound studies has increasingly been absorbed into the fields of musicology and ‘sound art’, this initial desire to explore sound’s wider cultural connections via historical analysis has struggled to remain at the fore of the discipline as more scholars embrace an attitude of ‘musical exceptionalism’ (Devine, 2019) that confers a greater importance to musicological histories. In following a more ‘traditional’ sound studies approach – beyond just music – the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), a small independent museum in Portsmouth, UK, has attempted to deconstruct accepted histories of sound rooted in 19th century white European and American perspectives. By presenting sounds as museum objects, MOPS uses traditional museological taxonomies to offer visitors ways of thinking about sounds, their histories and auditors, that spotlight unexpected stories of how attitudes supposedly relegated to the past including colonialism, white supremacy, gender inequality, institutionalised racism, and homophobia continue to echo throughout contemporary life to the present day.   

References:
Devine, Kyle. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
Mansell, James. ‘Historical Acoustemology: Past, Present, and Future’. Music Research Annual, no. 2 (2021): 1–19.

In the afternoon, a breakout session provided an opportunity for a small group of workshop attendees to participate in a group visit to our museum.

You can download a PDF file of slides from our Director’s presentation below.