Sound design for museums and art installations

This article is a few years old, but it offers an interesting take on how museums are using sound design in installations.

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show — which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

The rest of the article offers a brief survey of the various applications of sound.

More from the piece:

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences — in the uterus, in fact.”

Great point.

For a better sense of the many applications in which Terra has been used — and we’d love to be used in a museum or two, curator friends — check out our Applications page.

PHOTO CREDIT: Timothy Hursley/Museum of Modern Art