Playing it Back. Critical Reflections on Curating Sound

Over the last twenty years, museums and galleries have slowly opened their hearts, doors, walls and websites to the reverberation of sound works, musical performances and immersive installations. Finding microphones, musical instruments, vinyl records, turntables, amplifiers, musical scores, mixers, cassettes, recorders, headphones, wires, speakers and voices is not the rare occurrence that it once used to be. Exhibition halls are no longer the quiet, austere, sanctified spaces for contemplation either; codes of conduct such as measured silence and regulated movement have in many ways loos- ened.