Listening Desk: Bridging Sound Archives and Museum Engagement

Description

Museums and archives hold vast collections of recorded sound: oral histories, soundscapes, music, and field recordings that often remain underused due to a lack of accessible, engaging platforms for public listening.

This presentation introduced the Listening Desk, a bespoke interactive installation I created to address this gap by combining sculptural design, accessible hardware, and custom software into a single publicly facing archive listening station.

The desk uses a parametric directional speaker to project sound to an individual listener without headphones, paired with a hearing loop and design features supporting wheelchair users and people with fine motor, reach, or colour-vision difficulties. A custom HTML5 software platform, built by the artist, enables museums to upload sound and metadata, curate archive content, and integrate with existing collections, while also generating usage data such as dwell time and sound popularity for curatorial insight. The platform supports multiple modes of engagement, from single-track listening to soundscape creation and creative curation, and has been deployed in partnership with institutions including the British Library, the National Library of Wales, and The Keep, Brighton.

I presented findings from these deployments, notably a British Library case study in which the Listening Desk achieved an average dwell time of 5 minutes 47 seconds, significantly exceeding both the pre-existing digital average of 27 seconds and the original commissioning brief of 1 minute 30 seconds. The talk positioned the Listening Desk as a model for how thoughtfully designed physical interfaces can deepen public engagement with sound archives, extending their reach beyond specialist researchers to general museum audiences.

Period	18 Oct 2025
Event title	Sound in Museums
Event type	Conference
Location	Mafra, PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International