It's not every day you find yourself jostling for position in a crowd of fashionable festival goers who are hoping to catch sight of a steam engine. But that's what happened to me one weekend in May when I attended Steam Driven, a sonic spectacular at the British Engineerium, Hove.
The woman to my left held a mobile phone aloft so she could take a snap of the Watt governor. 'It's like an angel!' she declared to her friend as she watched its two steel balls spinning and scattering light from a laser.
The electronic music may not have been to everyone's taste, but it had packed this usually quiet museum to the rafters with a crowd who would rarely be seen there. This was a successful experiment for the Laptop Jams, a Brighton-based ensemble of live electronic performers.
They had created a silicon-driven spectacle that mixed technical narrations with electronic sounds, recorded engine noises and video, all precisely synchronised to the motions of the Corliss steam engine. This one-off event showed how sound could be used in a traditional steam museum to draw in a whole new audience.
One of the attractions of the Engineerium event was the mix of electronic sounds and steam. Packed with Victorian technology, the former Goldstone Pumping Station is an interesting contrast to the multimillion- pound science centres that opened with a fanfare at the start of the new millennium. Many of these are replete with sound - but how much thought has been put into their sound design?
A recent National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) award enabled me to visit some of these new attractions to find out for myself - and the results have been dismaying. Take one venue that looks at the human brain, for example. Videos, computer graphics and gargantuan photos show our grey matter in living colour.
But while visitors engage with new ideas about the human mind, they also have to wrestle with a cacophony of densely mixed human voices, accompanied by a high-pitched, electronic ostinato. This jingle is sharp and cold, its timbre redolent of a 1980s Casio organ.
And then there's the ape call. The ape isn't actually part of the brain exhibition but belongs to a jungle display a few metres away. Like many new-builds, this is an open-plan space so sound is free to diffuse around it.
But the sound has been deployed with no awareness of this. If the sound in this gallery conveys any message at all, it tells us the human mind is confusing, noisy, icy and located somewhere in the Brazilian rainforest.
These problems could have been avoided if the sound had been given the same care and attention as the graphic design of the space. Yet sound is something that too often gets squeezed out of the exhibition planning when time and budget are under pressure.
I'm astonished by the number of multimillion pound projects that audition sound just a day or so before opening. This seems a pity, as sound is such a powerful channel of communication, able to evoke emotions and remote environments, as well as convey ideas and information.
And as museums take on the challenge of abstract themes such as sustainability and particle physics, thoughtfully used sound may offer them a way to deal with some tricky material.
Tim Boon, the head of collections at the Science Museum, London, agrees. 'If as little attention were paid to visuals as is currently paid to audio, there would be outrage,' he says. 'Sound is often equated with noise - something that's a problem, when it should actually be regarded as an opportunity.'
An aficionado of vintage public information films, Boon isn't afraid to let the sound from archive film loops spill into the gallery. He sees it as an auditory shorthand, keying the visitor into the era and attitudes of the time.
In Treat Yourself, the 2003 show at the Science Museum, Boon approached sonic artist Brian Eno to contribute to the exhibition at the earliest stage. Eno was asked to sonify the entire gallery with a bespoke, ambient soundtrack. The result, Lydian Bells, was a contemplative piece in the Lydian mode, a musical scale historically associated with healing.
Lydian Bells set the tone of the gallery as strongly as any graphic statement. It was also an object lesson in low-tech interactivity. People interacted with it, simply by walking from one portable CD player to another, where different strands of the music played.
When sound becomes a problem, it can be tempting to silence a gallery by playing sound through headphones, rather than improving the quality of the gallery-borne sound itself.
That said, the audio tour has its uses - for instance, in historic sites where graphic interpretation is out of the question or in places where the tours need to cater for disparate audiences, such as children and adults.
The audio tour has been with us for many years. In fact, John Liffen, the curator of communications at the Science Museum, unearthed an entertaining account of an early, experimental audio tour that may interest any curators dreaming up a wi-fi museum today.
Back in 1961, the Ministry of Works dabbled with wireless technology, hooking up a tape machine to a small radio transmitter that continuously broadcast pre-recorded talks around the Science Museum.
Visitors could tune into these tours by hiring a 'telesonic lorgnette' - a plastic wand with a built-in receiver and earpiece. They could use this to eavesdrop on a staged conversation between a curator and a visiting husband and wife.
Forty years on, the telesonic lorgnette has become part of the Science Museum collections. But around the world, visitors still listen to audio tours through Walkman-style headphones, unaware of the sounds (or the silence) of the museum around them.
Typically, these tours make heavy use of the spoken word, from the dry and factual: 'the coloured particles are magnetite, a mineral form of iron oxide...' to the experimental: 'you now hear me biting into a Thai chilli...' and the downright indecipherable: 'a single telephone call uses as much energy as a candle burning on the Moon'.
In the era when we see museums experimenting with mobile, handheld computers, there is still plenty of value in the tried-and-tested audio tour. Some of the most interesting results are achieved when curators move away from the straight narrative and try something new.
In its 2004 event Shhh... Sounds in Spaces, the Victoria and Albert Museum invited ten sonic artists to select a space in the museum then create a soundtrack for it, experienced through a portable MP3 player. David Byrne, Roots Manuva and Elizabeth Fraser contributed to a lineup that would entice even the most reluctant museum visitor.
Lauren Parker, its co-curator, summed up the show's success: 'Shhh encouraged a younger, more mixed crowd into the museum. Not just into the contemporary galleries but the historical collections as well.'
I enjoyed the Shhh... experience. The sounds tempted me into some unlikely spaces and made me take a fresh look at well-known exhibits, such as the morbid busts in the Cast Room. But to some extent, I also found the headphones isolated me from the museum environment.
This trade-off between immersion and engagement is interesting - it's a problem that often crops up when sound is boxed away. While the audio tour can be a very effective way to bring sound to an exhibition, sound designer Luc Martinez is anxious we don't overuse it.
Speaking at International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting in Berlin last year, Martinez singled out the unfortunate phenomenon of the 'music mausoleum', a gallery bursting with musical instruments that have to remain silent, for legitimate conservation reasons.
The obvious solution is to play recorded sounds of these instruments but this raises the problem of noise spill. Many exhibitors deal with this by resorting to an audio tour or to sounds heard on handsets. But Martinez says this means that a gallery that could have been vibrant with sound is thus reduced to a silent chamber.
Martinez showed us an elegant solution that he recently installed at La Cité de la Musique, Paris. Here, a music gallery is enlivened with quiet, field recordings of real environments where music is heard at a distance (for instance, a cabaret bar).
If you opt to take a closer look at the instruments in the case, an electronic controller makes the ambient sound fade in your vicinity as the sounds of the instruments come into the foreground and some close-up music begins.
When you look at the gallery design process in the UK, it is not surprising that sound is so often left out of the picture. Most large galleries start off in written form. At the earliest stage, a list of objectives and statements on a piece of paper are bundled with some preliminary graphic and exhibit ideas and then handed to a design company.
This company will rustle up an artist's impression designed to sell the new concept to funders. And if the project goes ahead, the early stages of fabrication are dominated by architects and designers who imagine the gallery primarily in visual form.
Hopefully, in the future, more exhibition teams will make sound part of their blueprint. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) North is one very notable project where this has been attempted.
Wanting to make the most of the IWM's sound and photo archive, the exhibition team turned part of the main gallery into a blank canvas that plays a dramatic sound and photo show, once an hour. The lights go down when the show plays, forcing the visitors to stop, watch and listen.
The show is a memorable part of the visit, and unusually forthright in its use of sound. However, this approach wouldn't work in all museums as it effectively shuts down the central gallery. That said, the chilling sound of the Lancaster bomber flying overhead is well worth the disruption.
Of course, it is more usual to create gallery sounds that work on an ambient level, adding to the character of the gallery rather than dominating the visit. And some galleries are better without any audio at all - we don't need a soundtrack for everything in life.
But when sound is on the agenda, I hope more gallery teams will consider the sound design of their gallery as carefully as they consider its visual appearance.
In future, I also hope to hear imaginative narrations playing into the gallery, mixed with beautifully crafted, ambient sound, rather than boxed away in earphones.
This is a tall order, but one that can be met by sonic artists and engineers who are mindful of the art of sound mixing and the way sound diffuses through a building.
Ambient sound is an ideal medium for museums. It communicates in a different channel to the artefact; it doesn't require you to hold anything or look away from an exhibit. I think there is nothing more exciting than bathing in ambient sound among the treasures of a museum.
Sarah Angliss is a freelance sonic artist, engineer and researcher, based in Brighton (www.spacedog.biz). Her Nesta Dream Time award has been used to research new ways to deploy sound in public spaces
www.laptop-jams.com
In Museum Practice 31, published in August, Sarah Angliss will show how to add sound to your museum
The woman to my left held a mobile phone aloft so she could take a snap of the Watt governor. 'It's like an angel!' she declared to her friend as she watched its two steel balls spinning and scattering light from a laser.
The electronic music may not have been to everyone's taste, but it had packed this usually quiet museum to the rafters with a crowd who would rarely be seen there. This was a successful experiment for the Laptop Jams, a Brighton-based ensemble of live electronic performers.
They had created a silicon-driven spectacle that mixed technical narrations with electronic sounds, recorded engine noises and video, all precisely synchronised to the motions of the Corliss steam engine. This one-off event showed how sound could be used in a traditional steam museum to draw in a whole new audience.
One of the attractions of the Engineerium event was the mix of electronic sounds and steam. Packed with Victorian technology, the former Goldstone Pumping Station is an interesting contrast to the multimillion- pound science centres that opened with a fanfare at the start of the new millennium. Many of these are replete with sound - but how much thought has been put into their sound design?
A recent National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) award enabled me to visit some of these new attractions to find out for myself - and the results have been dismaying. Take one venue that looks at the human brain, for example. Videos, computer graphics and gargantuan photos show our grey matter in living colour.
But while visitors engage with new ideas about the human mind, they also have to wrestle with a cacophony of densely mixed human voices, accompanied by a high-pitched, electronic ostinato. This jingle is sharp and cold, its timbre redolent of a 1980s Casio organ.
And then there's the ape call. The ape isn't actually part of the brain exhibition but belongs to a jungle display a few metres away. Like many new-builds, this is an open-plan space so sound is free to diffuse around it.
But the sound has been deployed with no awareness of this. If the sound in this gallery conveys any message at all, it tells us the human mind is confusing, noisy, icy and located somewhere in the Brazilian rainforest.
These problems could have been avoided if the sound had been given the same care and attention as the graphic design of the space. Yet sound is something that too often gets squeezed out of the exhibition planning when time and budget are under pressure.
I'm astonished by the number of multimillion pound projects that audition sound just a day or so before opening. This seems a pity, as sound is such a powerful channel of communication, able to evoke emotions and remote environments, as well as convey ideas and information.
And as museums take on the challenge of abstract themes such as sustainability and particle physics, thoughtfully used sound may offer them a way to deal with some tricky material.
Tim Boon, the head of collections at the Science Museum, London, agrees. 'If as little attention were paid to visuals as is currently paid to audio, there would be outrage,' he says. 'Sound is often equated with noise - something that's a problem, when it should actually be regarded as an opportunity.'
An aficionado of vintage public information films, Boon isn't afraid to let the sound from archive film loops spill into the gallery. He sees it as an auditory shorthand, keying the visitor into the era and attitudes of the time.
In Treat Yourself, the 2003 show at the Science Museum, Boon approached sonic artist Brian Eno to contribute to the exhibition at the earliest stage. Eno was asked to sonify the entire gallery with a bespoke, ambient soundtrack. The result, Lydian Bells, was a contemplative piece in the Lydian mode, a musical scale historically associated with healing.
Lydian Bells set the tone of the gallery as strongly as any graphic statement. It was also an object lesson in low-tech interactivity. People interacted with it, simply by walking from one portable CD player to another, where different strands of the music played.
When sound becomes a problem, it can be tempting to silence a gallery by playing sound through headphones, rather than improving the quality of the gallery-borne sound itself.
That said, the audio tour has its uses - for instance, in historic sites where graphic interpretation is out of the question or in places where the tours need to cater for disparate audiences, such as children and adults.
The audio tour has been with us for many years. In fact, John Liffen, the curator of communications at the Science Museum, unearthed an entertaining account of an early, experimental audio tour that may interest any curators dreaming up a wi-fi museum today.
Back in 1961, the Ministry of Works dabbled with wireless technology, hooking up a tape machine to a small radio transmitter that continuously broadcast pre-recorded talks around the Science Museum.
Visitors could tune into these tours by hiring a 'telesonic lorgnette' - a plastic wand with a built-in receiver and earpiece. They could use this to eavesdrop on a staged conversation between a curator and a visiting husband and wife.
Forty years on, the telesonic lorgnette has become part of the Science Museum collections. But around the world, visitors still listen to audio tours through Walkman-style headphones, unaware of the sounds (or the silence) of the museum around them.
Typically, these tours make heavy use of the spoken word, from the dry and factual: 'the coloured particles are magnetite, a mineral form of iron oxide...' to the experimental: 'you now hear me biting into a Thai chilli...' and the downright indecipherable: 'a single telephone call uses as much energy as a candle burning on the Moon'.
In the era when we see museums experimenting with mobile, handheld computers, there is still plenty of value in the tried-and-tested audio tour. Some of the most interesting results are achieved when curators move away from the straight narrative and try something new.
In its 2004 event Shhh... Sounds in Spaces, the Victoria and Albert Museum invited ten sonic artists to select a space in the museum then create a soundtrack for it, experienced through a portable MP3 player. David Byrne, Roots Manuva and Elizabeth Fraser contributed to a lineup that would entice even the most reluctant museum visitor.
Lauren Parker, its co-curator, summed up the show's success: 'Shhh encouraged a younger, more mixed crowd into the museum. Not just into the contemporary galleries but the historical collections as well.'
I enjoyed the Shhh... experience. The sounds tempted me into some unlikely spaces and made me take a fresh look at well-known exhibits, such as the morbid busts in the Cast Room. But to some extent, I also found the headphones isolated me from the museum environment.
This trade-off between immersion and engagement is interesting - it's a problem that often crops up when sound is boxed away. While the audio tour can be a very effective way to bring sound to an exhibition, sound designer Luc Martinez is anxious we don't overuse it.
Speaking at International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting in Berlin last year, Martinez singled out the unfortunate phenomenon of the 'music mausoleum', a gallery bursting with musical instruments that have to remain silent, for legitimate conservation reasons.
The obvious solution is to play recorded sounds of these instruments but this raises the problem of noise spill. Many exhibitors deal with this by resorting to an audio tour or to sounds heard on handsets. But Martinez says this means that a gallery that could have been vibrant with sound is thus reduced to a silent chamber.
Martinez showed us an elegant solution that he recently installed at La Cité de la Musique, Paris. Here, a music gallery is enlivened with quiet, field recordings of real environments where music is heard at a distance (for instance, a cabaret bar).
If you opt to take a closer look at the instruments in the case, an electronic controller makes the ambient sound fade in your vicinity as the sounds of the instruments come into the foreground and some close-up music begins.
When you look at the gallery design process in the UK, it is not surprising that sound is so often left out of the picture. Most large galleries start off in written form. At the earliest stage, a list of objectives and statements on a piece of paper are bundled with some preliminary graphic and exhibit ideas and then handed to a design company.
This company will rustle up an artist's impression designed to sell the new concept to funders. And if the project goes ahead, the early stages of fabrication are dominated by architects and designers who imagine the gallery primarily in visual form.
Hopefully, in the future, more exhibition teams will make sound part of their blueprint. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) North is one very notable project where this has been attempted.
Wanting to make the most of the IWM's sound and photo archive, the exhibition team turned part of the main gallery into a blank canvas that plays a dramatic sound and photo show, once an hour. The lights go down when the show plays, forcing the visitors to stop, watch and listen.
The show is a memorable part of the visit, and unusually forthright in its use of sound. However, this approach wouldn't work in all museums as it effectively shuts down the central gallery. That said, the chilling sound of the Lancaster bomber flying overhead is well worth the disruption.
Of course, it is more usual to create gallery sounds that work on an ambient level, adding to the character of the gallery rather than dominating the visit. And some galleries are better without any audio at all - we don't need a soundtrack for everything in life.
But when sound is on the agenda, I hope more gallery teams will consider the sound design of their gallery as carefully as they consider its visual appearance.
In future, I also hope to hear imaginative narrations playing into the gallery, mixed with beautifully crafted, ambient sound, rather than boxed away in earphones.
This is a tall order, but one that can be met by sonic artists and engineers who are mindful of the art of sound mixing and the way sound diffuses through a building.
Ambient sound is an ideal medium for museums. It communicates in a different channel to the artefact; it doesn't require you to hold anything or look away from an exhibit. I think there is nothing more exciting than bathing in ambient sound among the treasures of a museum.
Sarah Angliss is a freelance sonic artist, engineer and researcher, based in Brighton (www.spacedog.biz). Her Nesta Dream Time award has been used to research new ways to deploy sound in public spaces
www.laptop-jams.com
In Museum Practice 31, published in August, Sarah Angliss will show how to add sound to your museum
