Today we experience a ‘sonic turn’ in museums. Sound enters the museum experience in new and more ubiquitous ways: we move through designed soundscapes, listen to intimate in-ear narrations and engage in noisy spectacles. At times sounds take centre stage and appear as ‘displayed objects’: as music, as radio, as art – and even as everyday soundscapes documenting the sensory conditions of past lives. But do we fully understand the implications of sound as heritage? Do we know what to preserve and how to preserve it? Do we have the tools and methods necessary to make sounds of the past audible to listeners of the future? And are we confident with the conceptual and theoretical implications of approaching the past as sound?
For more than a century now, sound has emerged as a heritage issue. The incentive to preserve voices, dialects, singing and music is as old as recording technology itself, and many societies have now built impressive collections of music, radio, soundscapes etc. The past becomes ever more audible. Yet, approaching sonic cultural heritage involves having attention not only to stored objects, but to intricate interplays between material and immaterial culture, between the tangible and the intangible, between recorded sounds and evasive listening practises, between outdated technologies and the listening experiences these technologies generated. Sonic cultural heritage must be conceived as an interplay between preserved objects and the practices through which these became significant. But how do we approach and built archives to account for sonic pasts? How might we search for past sounds and listening situations? and how could we convey this to museum visitors?
This conference is initiated by the new National Knowledge Center for Sonic Cultural Heritage and set in the City of Sound, Struer, Denmark to facilitate the local, national and international development of the field. It explores the concept of sonic heritage: the ideologies and myths embedded, the discourses surrounding, the ambiguities within the idea of preserving sound, and the problems faced when delimiting a space, a territory or a group to whom a certain heritage belong. The conference sets out to unravel the conceptual and theoretical foundation for sonic cultural heritage, and to demonstrate the options and perspectives for a history of sound.
PROGRAM
Check in from 9.30
10.30 Welcome by Head of SOKU Jacob Kreutzfeldt
10.45 - 11.55 PRODUCING SONIC HERITAGE: CONCEPTS, IDEOLOGIES AND INSTITUTIONS
- Mariana J. López: Presence and mostly…absence: sound heritage and UNESCO Conventions
- Meri Kytö & Heikki Uimonen: Translatability of Sonic Experience – Soundscapes, Field Recordings and Cultural Brokerage
- Moderated discussion
12.00 Jacob Eriksen introduces Struer Tracks and BRAGET
12.10 - 13.40 Lunch (incl. official opening of Struer Tracks at 13.00)
13.40 - 14.50 CURATING SOUND: SPACES AND PUBLICS
- Carsten Seiffarth: Curating Sound Installation Art
- Alcina Cortez: Curating Sound in Museum Spaces to Enable the Social
- Moderated discussion
14.50 - 15.15 Break
15.15 - 16.25 HISTORICIZING SOUND AND LISTENING
- James G. Mansell: Historical Acoustemology: Between Historical Research and Public Sound History
- Jakob Ingemann Parby: Listening to noise, voices and silences of 19th century Copenhagen
- Moderated discussion
16.25 - 16.30 Round up and final comments
EXTRA OFFERS
16.30 - 18.00 Tour of Struer Tracks guided by Jacob Kreutzfeldt and Daniela B. M. Elneff
18.00 - 19.30 Communal dining at Søsportens Hus
Evening program Struer Tracks performances at Folkets Hus
The conference will be held at Folkets Hus in Struer and will be in English.
The conference wil take place during the Struer Tracks biennnial for sound and listening. Please visit the Struer Tracks webside for information about the extensive program of concerts, installations, workshops, seminars and other events taking place in Struer 14-16 August.
PRESENTATIONS
James G. Mansell: Historical Acoustemology: Between Historical Research and Public Sound History
This paper argues that recovering past sound worlds is a matter not only of finding sound in the historical record, but also of understanding past ways of hearing and listening. What sounds mean and how they are heard is historically specific and changes from one period to another. This poses a challenge to the historian, who must learn how to ‘listen with’ historical hearing subjects. It also poses a challenge to the curator and public historian, who must negotiate encounters between present day listeners and the sounds of the past. To avoid bringing only present-day ears to past sounds, how might curators and historians prepare listeners to encounter past sound worlds and to hear as those in the past heard? The paper will draw on two recent projects. First, ‘Time Loops,’ a project seeking to bring historical sound technologies to life at the Science Museum, London, via engagement with composers and musicians. Second, ‘The Invisible Telegraph of the Future,’ a collaborative project bringing together historians, museum curators, composers, and musicians, to engage listening audiences in the history of the entanglement between spiritualism and early network technologies in the late nineteenth century.
James G. Mansell is Professor of Cultural History and Sound Studies and Co-Director of the newly launched Sound Research Centre at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (2017) and several texts on sound history methodology, including ‘Historical Acoustemology: Past, Present and Future’ (Music Research Annual, 2021). He has led several research projects on sound in museums, including most recently ‘Musical Affordances and Counterfactuals’ (AHRC funded) with the Science Museum, London, which staged a new kind of ‘museum concert’ called ‘Time Loops’.
Mariana J. López: Presence and mostly…absence: sound heritage and UNESCO Conventions
The study of acoustical heritage and historical soundscapes is often associated with the concept of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and, consequently, it has been connected to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. In addition to this, the World Heritage Convention (WHC), under its criteria for “Outstanding Universal Value”, has allowed for the listing of sites due to their associated intangible heritage, and its category of “Cultural Landscapes” encompasses relevant intangible heritage and, as a result, sonic elements.
But do these Conventions actually embrace sound heritage? This talk will present the results of an in-depth exploration conducted as part of the publication ‘Sonic Pasts: acoustical heritage and historical soundscapes’ of both the ICH and the WHC lists. It will show the limited appreciation of sound, beyond music, among listed ICH, while also demonstrating that the WHC listings have focused on noise, as a nuisance that needs to be eradicated, without ever reflecting on what is left to be listened to once that noise is no longer there.
Mariana J. López is a Professor in Sound Production and Post Production at the University of York. She specialises in sound design and accessibility, as well as acoustical heritage and historical soundscapes. She has recently published her book 'Sonic Pasts: acoustical heritage and historical soundscapes' reflecting on sound heritage through the lenses of postcolonial, gender, socioeconomic, and disability studies. She is also the Principal Investigator for the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Enhancing Audio Description II: implementing accessible, personalised and inclusive film and television experiences for visually impaired audiences’. She is also active in the field of sound design, having worked on sound installations, film, theatre and interactive media productions.
Jakob Ingemann Parby: Listening to noise, voices and silences of 19th century Copenhagen
How do we study past soundscapes and auralities? And how can sensory and emotional historiography help us understand urban life in a more nuanced and multifaceted way? Based on my recent book Lyden af Hovedstaden (The Sound of Copenhagen – Gads Forlag 2025) this talk unfolds how listening to processes of industrialization and metropolization and curating a special exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen in which the soundscapes and listening practices of 19th Copenhagen take center stage has meant to me.
Studying sound history goes well beyond the exercises of mapping and reconstruction elements in soundscape. Instead, we need to take on a multipronged approach that explores sounds in conjunction with the power structures and aural regimes that formed individual and collective perceptions of the sonic environment. Curating historical sound proposes a similar challenge and responsibility – it is immensely important to go beyond simple reconstruction and to somehow get across to the visitor that although some sounds (like churchbells or the sound of horsedrawn wagons) are still with us, their meaning has changed immensely over time.
Jakob Ingemann Parby is a curator and senior researcher at the Museum of Copenhagen specializing in urban history, migration history, commemorative urban practices and the history of everyday life. He has been the PI of The Sound of Copenhagen-project (2020-2025) and is currently PI of The Everyday Life of Urban Monuments research network. He has published extensively on urban history with a focus on the history of Copenhagen.
Carsten Seiffarth: Curating Sound Installation Art
Although so-called sound art has established itself as a new art form on the border between visual art and music over the last few decades, it still plays a rather marginal role in the classical exhibition scene. Why this is the case, how installative sound art differs from audio art and what problems curators are confronted with when organising sound exhibitions is the subject of this lecture. It will also deal with the re-installation of historically important sound installations that Carsten Seiffarth has been realising for several years.
Carsten Seiffarth, born 1963 in Berlin. He studied orchestral music (trombone) in Weimar, musicology/sociology at the TU Berlin. Since 1991 freelance project work as curator and producer for sound art and contemporary music. Collaboration with festivals, galleries, museums, theatres, foundations. He curated numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Europe, South and North America and Asia. Editor of various publications, e.g. "singuhr — hoergalerie", "tesla—media art lab berlin", "sound exchange", "sonic explorers", "listening/hearing" and artist monographs. Member of the festival direction "INVENTIONEN" 2000-2008, Berlin. 2005-2007 member of the artistic direction of "tesla media-art-labor berlin". 2011/2012 artistic director of "sound exchange-Experimental Music Cultures in Central Eastern Europe". 2010-2021 curator & director of "bonn hoeren", since 2022 of "echoes—soundforum bonn". Since 1996 curator & director of "singuhr—hoergalerie", since 2014 "singuhr—projects", Berlin. Curator of "SITUATIONS: Listening to Spaces" concert installations at the Darmstadt Summer Course 2025.
Heikki Uimonen & Meri Kytö: Translatability of Sonic Experience – Soundscapes, Field Recordings and Cultural Brokerage
When studying and archiving the qualitative characteristics of sonic environments, incorporating the cultural and collective meanings connected to environmental sounds are of major importance. Our talk deals with ethnographic soundscape research projects and their relation to the topic of acoustic heritage by paying special attention to the concept of cultural brokerage and challenges in translatability of sonic experiences. Firstly we present our assorted projects, and how acoustic heritage and diverse acoustic epistemologies are manifested in the collected data through personal and collective remembering. Second, we discuss cultural brokerage as a curatorial framing possibility of listenable objects, dodging the fetish-like pull of field recordings, and claim that translating soundscape competence is the object of audible culture heritage work.
Research director Heikki Uimonen (PhD) is an ethnomusicologist and a docent on acoustic communication and soundscape studies at the University of Eastern Finland and University of Tampere. His research interests include sonic construction of place, mediated music, social use of music, transforming sensory environments and how all these intertwine. He has published and co-published articles, monographs and edited anthologies on music consumption, radio music, compact cassettes, background music and transforming sensory environments. Uimonen is currently directing Academy of Finland and Niilo Helander foundation financed project SOMECO - Sonic Mediations and Ecocritical Listening (2024–2027) investigating soundscapes of six European villages.
PhD Meri Kytö is working as a University Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Turku and is an Associate Professor (title of Docent) in Auditory Culture Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. Her expertise is in studying the sonic environment, listening methodologies and technology. Her research tackles space and sonic domestication, articulations of acoustic privacy, sensory agency and labor, and aural diversity and machine listening interfaces. She is the chair of the Finnish Society for Musicology and a convenor of the Sensory Media Anthropology Network at EASA. Website with publications
Alcina Cortez: Curating Sound in Museum Spaces to Enable the Social
In recent years, museums have increasingly embraced multimodal exhibition practices, with sound taking on a fundamental role. This trend reflects a growing recognition of sound’s unique ability to create resonant, memorable experiences for visitors. However, sound is not only an evocative sensory medium, but also a powerful tool for shaping social spaces within the museum context. This aligns with museums’ current emphasis on community-building and collective engagement. Among sound-based multimodal museum practices, sound art and ambiance are particularly effective in building a space for social attunment, moving beyond traditional, static models of spatial organization. Drawing on the theories of Henri Lefebvre and Martina Löw, these practices demonstrate how sound can transform museum spaces into dynamic environments shaped by social interactions and relationships. This presentation explores the potential of sound to redefine exhibition spaces, focusing on its role in constructing spaces that are experienced collectively. The discussion is grounded in analyses of two notable exhibitions: The Disharmony of Spheres by Foo/ Skou and Stranger than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition. Both exhibitions exemplify how sound can serve as a catalyst for new forms of spatial and social experience, presenting opportunities for visitors to engage primarily with the evolving social dynamics within the space.
Alcina Cortez has been a curator and producer of exhibitions since 1996 and a researcher at INET-md, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Alcina served at Expo'98, and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal (2001-2011). She studied piano, cello and composition, graduated in Musicology (1992), took postgraduate courses in Popular Music Studies (2011) and Acoustic and Sound Studies (2019), and obtained her MCs (2014) and her PhD (2022) in Ethnomusicology/Museum Studies.
Her research explores the intricate relationship between humans and exhibited sound in museums, delving into the nuances of perception, sensation, and the complex processes of creating meaning. Her insights have culminated in a book and multiple articles featured in journals such as Popular Music, Sound Studies and Curator, The Museum Journal. She is the founder of the International Conference Sound in Museums, leading discussions at the nexus of auditory experience and cultural display, and is the founding editor of the The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound in Museums (to be released in 2026).
