Sonic Days 2024

Museums have been described as exhibitionary complexes and scopic regimes, both concepts stressing their orientation towards display and visuality, what Martin Jay has also characterized as ocularcentrism. However, new technologies have enabled other modalities, most notably sound, to become ingrained in contemporary exhibition design.
According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan a hot medium is relying on one sense modality in high definition requiring low participation from the audience. A cool medium, on the other hand, provides less detailed, or fragmented, information requiring more participation. Thus, following the ocularcentrism of exhibitions, they could be considered as hot media environments. Consequently, also including sound in the exhibition design could be considered as a cooling of, or tempering of the media environment, requiring, or enabling, more participation from the visitor.
Thinking along with McLuhans temperature metaphor, and applying it to exhibition design, we explore the affordances of sound as a tempering of the media environment of exhibitions that simultaneously requires and enables visitors to use their imagination more actively in the meaning-making – giving wings to their imagination, metaphorically speaking. Thus, sound provides exhibition designers with opportunities to engage in more complex storytelling.
We substantiate our argument with illustrative examples from the H.C. Andersen’s House in Odense, The Viking Sorceress exhibition at the National Museum of Denmark and the exhibition Might and Magic in the ruins underneath Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen.
We discuss whether a more temperate, or balanced, media environment can counteract the ocularcentric bias of the exhibition medium and afford more complex meaning-making experiences. We argue that such an approach, placing more demands on the visitors’ participation and engagement, might appeal to some visitors but alienate others. Finally, we challenge the premise of McLuhan’s temperature metaphor and discuss how certain ways of using exhibition sound might actually “heat up” the experience rather than “cooling” it down.