Staging listening: new methods for engaging audiences with sound in museums

This article reports on the experimental methodology and key findings of the AHRC-funded impact and engagement project Sonic Futures: Collecting, Curating and Engaging with Sound at the National Science and Media Museum (2020–21). The project undertook a series of listening-based public engagement activities – described here as staging listening – to identify new ways of engaging listening audiences with sound technology objects in museums. These activities led to the creation of three new interactive sounding exhibit prototypes created jointly with audiences. Because the project took place during periods of lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic in the UK in 2020–21, the exhibit prototypes were created digitally and tested via online interaction. The article argues that engaging with listening audiences can diversify and enrich museum listening scenarios, a term we use here to describe auditory situations which elicit different kinds of listening attention, interaction and learning. These listening scenarios produce divergent signatures of listening, a concept we develop here to describe the various kinds of learning and engagement we observed throughout the project.