About

Over the last decade, what has been called ‘the sonic turn’ across the humanities has comprised a proliferation of historical, anthropological and sociological studies of sound and listening and their relationship with technology, society and place. This has encompassed theatre and hybrid performance practices, as well as museum studies and philosophies of science. Drawing on this scholarship and developments in communicating Space at the Science Museum (including in new permanent galleries), this project will use practice-based experiments with sound, listening and music as materiality, metaphor and metonym, drawing formally on the principles of quantum mechanics and general relativity to tune into dynamic temporal, physical, intersubjective and atmospheric scales that exist beyond human perception, ultimately positing live acts of listening as embodied fieldwork into theoretical physics.

General Relativity and Quantum mechanics are two dominant paradigms in fundamental physics that have rewritten physicists’ understanding of the nature of time, space and matter on macro and microscopic scales, and raise drastic existential questions that reshape notions of objectivity, subjectivity and linear time. Referring to timescales and relationships beyond human sensory perception, both sets of theories are notoriously difficult to understand and communicate, however structurally - in evoking ontological uncertainty and relationality at the core of matter - they find parallels in key questions at the heart of performance studies and philosophies of listening, suggesting fertile ground for novel interdisciplinary conversation.

The challenge of evoking these concepts in an accessible and engaging way is particularly prescient in the Science Museum, a mainstream site of science communication and education whose foundations lie in an object-oriented curatorial approach. Speculative curation presents a rich site of investigation for novel approaches that this practice-based research will emerge in dialogue with. This project will bring questions around scientific knowledge transcription and representation into conversation with sound, music and performance studies, asking: how do we listen to outer space? This question will be used to interrogate how embodied sound and listening practices can discursively expand understanding in evolving fields of enquiry in cosmology, theoretical physics, ecology and philosophy.