Listen: Making Sense of Sound is organized by subject area as follows:
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A museum visitor tries
the Pinnae Play exhibit |
Listening for Pleasure and Patterns
By listening with musicians’ ears, visitors recognize the patterns that provide the structural framework for musical composition. Experience the parallels between musical elements such as pitch, harmony, timbre, rhythm and physical concepts such as frequency and resonance. Pentaphone is an opportunity for visitors to improvise and collaborate in making music together—even if they can’t play an instrument. In the Listening Jukebox Room, visitors wrestle with the distinctions between noise and music as they explore a diverse menu of musical compositions from around the world.
Soundscapes in the Sonic Soup
Rainforests, factories, city streets and the Exploratorium itself are all soundscapes. From a human heartbeat to the sonic world of an automobile, visitors explore a range of soundscapes at varying scales — all heard experiences that evoke the questions Where? and What? At Sonic Storytelling, use everyday objects to make a horse gallop or a door creak in your own radio drama. At Equalizer, listen to the “sonic soup” of the Exploratorium through a microphone and change the sound by manipulating a 31-band graphic equalizer. Or immerse yourself in the soundscape art of artists-in-residence Ali Momeni, Nigel Helyer and Michelle Nagai.
Listening to Understand Each Other
For most people, “listening” is first associated with human speech and communication. At Eavesdropping, relax in a salon chair while listening to the conversations played through your hairdryer. Listen to three conversations at once — in a restaurant, at a hair salon and in a classroom — while considering which ones pull you in and why. Explore the production and interpretation of speech including attention and the constraints of listening, known as intermodal conflict. For instance, at Listening While Talking, pick up the telephone receiver to listen to the jokes. The trick is that you have to keep talking!
Listening Depends on Who We Are
What are the subjective, emotional, and cultural aspects of listening? Observe your own associations with sound – including comfort, threat, and fear – and gain an appreciation of the importance of sound in creating an emotional experience or mood. At Sound Memories, explore sound memories and their links to emotions. Visit the Listening Theater, which highlights real people – from car mechanics to therapists – who use listening in their lives.
Pathways and Impediments to Hearing
Explore the physiological processes of hearing. What are the pathways by which sound is transmitted to the brain for processing? Learn about some surprising alternate routes like bone conduction at Sound Bite. Experience sound conducted through your jawbones instead of through your ears. Hear the way a cochlea-implant-wearer hears; experience tinnitus and other noise-induced hearing loss symptoms. Take a fantastic voyage through the middle and inner ear and gain a new appreciation for how this amazing mechanism collects and interprets vibrations as sound.
Listening Skills
By taking a sonic journey through a San Francisco BART station with a person who is blind, visitors gain an appreciation of the skills needed to navigate by ear. Exhibits demonstrate how we use our “two ears and one brain” to localize sound. At Reversed Ears find out how your world would sound different if your left and right ears were reversed. Try on some wild listening contraptions to find out. Or accept the challenge to “out quiet” yourself in order to discover the importance of being quiet in the feedback loop of listening.
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