Sounding Erddig: Music, Sound, and Interpretation in Historic House Museums

Description

Music is often conspicuous in the material settings of house museums, which may include performance spaces, feature musical themes in furniture or decoration, or hold musical collections including instruments, scores, and playback technologies. The sound of music interacted with the other noises of domestic life to produce wider soundscapes that were specific to individual dwellings in particular historical moments. As an interpretive resource, sound can enliven existing narratives based on material collections, and function as a particularly powerful tool in discovering and envoicing marginalised histories that may be poorly represented in material holdings or existing visual and textual presentations. But most approaches used in museums and galleries are unsuitable for historic houses because of curatorial constraints, unsuitable infrastructure, and especially the visitor’s desire for a sense of time travel to a “home” untouched by technology.

This paper outlines how these opportunities and challenges have been addressed at Erddig, a country house museum (UK National Trust). Reconstruction of Erddig’s sonic history involved recording and filming performances of Erddig’s music on and off site, mainly but with professional HIP performers, and recreating the wider domestic sound environment through soundwalking exercises with National Trust volunteers and staff. We show how the resulting sound bank was constructed as an open online resource before describing an onsite experiment with immersive publication technology that launches audio, video, and image content on personal devices directly via image recognition, allowing print products to be used conventionally, for those who do not wish to engage, and providing significantly smoother links to multimedia enhancement, for those who do. We will present preliminary evaluations of visitors’ engagement and share insights from the co-creation process between the researchers, creative practitioners and different layers of the NT team. We will conclude by suggesting some preliminary concept transfer guidance.

Period	17 Oct 2025 → 19 Oct 2025
Event title	Sound in Museums: International Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Mafra, PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International