This is a transcription of the Multisensory episode of the Sensational Shorts podcast, produced and recorded by The Sensational Museum Postdocs, Dr Sophie Vohra and Dr Charlotte Slark
Audio
Speaker vocal descriptions
Sophie speaks in a clear and considered way, with a lyrical, soft and lower vocal tone… and occasionally some loud laughs! Putting on her more ‘formal voice’, here she speaks with a ‘non-typical’ north-western accent (aka suspend your disbelief that everyone there sounds like they are from Liverpool, Manchester or Bury), with dropped ‘a’s and stronger annunciation. She often wonders if her different code-switching voices that make up critical parts of her identity (day-to-day, Macclesfield, Yorkshire, academic/telephone, British Indian, Spanish) come through.
Charlotte speaks animatedly and talks faster when she’s excited. She has a southern English accent, which a local person would identify as a somewhat polished combination of Slough and Staines upon Thames (think quite hard consonants!). It’s the accent of someone from a working-class background who has spent a lot of time having to fit-in in middle class spaces.
Notes on transcript style
- Punctuation is used to indicate the way the content was delivered, rather than necessarily being grammatically correct. Please try and read it with these pauses (or not as the case may be) in mind.
- Words in square brackets and in italics, [like this], indicate delivery types (e.g. softly; animated), audible occurrences (e.g. laugh; sigh), and sound differences (e.g. quieter delivery) in the recording.
- Ellipses (like… this) indicate a short break between sentences.
- Italicised words (like this) indicate emphasis placed more heavily on the words as they are delivered.
- Quotation marks (“like this”) mean we are suggesting this is something someone might have said (e.g., she said, “oh, that was weird”, and I could see why)
- Whereas quotation marks (‘like this’) mean we are emphasising it as a useful term (e.g. ‘the fourth wall’).
Transcript
[The podcast starts with The Sensational Museum audio logo: A conspiratorial female voice says ‘The Sensational Museum’. Lower in volume, almost distant, people are chattering excitedly in a large, echoey space. A warm, major chord chimes and fades out]
Charlotte 00:05
Welcome to the multisensory edition of the Sensational Shorts Podcast. I’m Charlotte Slark
Sophie 00.13
And I’m Sophie Vohra.
Charlotte 00:15
Today we’re going to be introducing you to the concept of multisensory in museums. But first we’ll do some brief introductions. Sophie, did you want to go first?
Sophie 00:24
I’m a woman in my, still early 30s, with just below the ear-length brown, curly hair, when it decides to comply with me. I’m wearing some very thin metal rimmed glasses and a shirt today that reminds me of my grandad’s flat cap. If you’ve ever [starts to chuckle] encountered one of those?
Charlotte 00:46
That is a perfect description of that shirt [Sophie laughs loudly and Charlotte joins in].
Sophie 00:50
How about you, Charlotte? Tell us about you today.
Charlotte 00:52
So I am a woman in my 30s with blonde curly hair that’s tied up into a bun today, I’ve got, red wire framed glasses, and I’m wearing a, blue jumper with two snails printed on it from the Wildlife Trust, because I like snails!
Sophie 01:09
[Laughing gently] So specific, but so adorable.
Charlotte 01:14
[Joining Sophie laughing] Thank you. So, what do we mean by multisensory? We move through the wild using multiple senses to make sense of everything that we encounter. We use lots of different senses to make sense of the world. Sophie, what does multisensory mean to you?
Sophie 01:28
Well, I think one of the biggest mind-blowing moments of starting this project was being told by the incredible, Alison Eardley that there are, in fact, not five senses. Which, blew my mind [Charlotte chuckles in the background] and then opened up my perception of what we’re actually doing on this project, and, I think, that in turn, very much changed the concept of what we thought about multisensory, because in that context then, when we move it away just from five senses, it means pulling together a number of things that allow you to experience something on multiple levels. That sounded really exciting the more that we got into it. Having just dropped the bombshell that there are more than five senses Charlotte, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the other ones that are perhaps not as well known or kind of fit into the matrix of how we experience the world?
Charlotte 02:26
Yes, of course. So first of all, we can think of broadening out those core five senses that we’re all taught in primary school to include lots of different things. So when we think of touch, we think of it in a really, simple way, but it can mean a lot of different things. So it can be the way we perceive temperature, for example, could be considered a sense. Proprioception, which is the way that we perceive ourself in a space, and the way that we understand the way that we move and the impact that will have, but also the way that our surroundings impact on us. If we think about the way that we understand our own internal movement, so the way that we feel things inside, so interception. The way that we experience pain, these are all elements of touch that are much broader than this, just one word or one concept can kind of explain. And then there’s all kinds of other things. When you know that somebody is staring at you, that is a sense in itself. The way that we sense danger, the way that our nervous system responds to, subtle things that we may not be picking up on a conscious level, those are all senses. So what does this mean for the context of museums? I think that something that’s really important for the project is that Western museums have historically been very visual, and this is deeply rooted in colonialism and very colonial ideas of the senses. So for example, sight and hearing were seen as the most civilised senses, mostly because when colonisers went and explored the world, they encountered people that were much more focused on things like oral histories. But, taste and touch, those needed to be framed in a way that was less civilised in order to create that binary idea of ‘civilised versus uncivilised’. And this has been really prevalent in, in museums, and the way that we encounter objects, items, things in museums. We want to move away from that idea, that museums need to be very visual, but that doesn’t mean that we’re saying museums shouldn’t be visual at all. What are your thoughts on this Sophie?
Sophie 04:35
It’s a difficult concept, isn’t it? I think that, we can very easily start swapping one sense for another. And I think this is where that concept of thinking of multisensory, understanding our interactions with the world, and particularly in this sense, in with our interactions with museum spaces and collections, is that we, and I think you said this Charlotte once, which was really profound to me, is that you bring everything up to the same volume, rather than dialling everything down to the lowest ones. And I think that that was really critical in thinking about what we do here, is we don’t have to, take away from the types of work that we already do, we just need to lift up everything else to be a part of that. And, you know, that’s not an easy piece of work, to do. We, we’ve got so used to, not only existing in our own world, particularly in a visual way, but museums are so, rooted in that. And from a, you know, kind of collections point of view, you have a description and you have an image, and that is what you expect to be able to have access to the content, which then very much feeds itself forward into what you then get communicated. But what happens when we start to then pull that apart, dismantle visual as being the key one, and I’m really excited to see how that works in these kind of communicative ways that strand B is really pushing for. And I wonder whether you just want to say a little bit about what you hope for this Charlotte in terms of the multisensory and what it will do for your work.
Charlotte 06:15
Yeah, for me, it’s really questioning where and why vision is used as that default way of engaging, as you’ve just explained, Sophie. And it goes down to this base idea that we use a lot in the project, which is that no one sense is necessary or sufficient [Sophie makes a noise in agreement in the background]. So for me, it’s really about giving people choice of how they engage. Like we’ve already said, you go through the world experiencing everything in your life in a multisensory way. And why should museums be different to this. You should be able to experience artworks, objects, ideas, narratives in lots of different ways [Sophie hums in agreement], rather than just looking at them, or rather than just having a description of what it looks like. Even if you can’t necessarily touch the object itself, you should be able to get a sense of what that feels like or why that’s important. For example, if you have a sword, is it important what it looks like? Is that the reason, that it’s in your gallery? Or is it to communicate that swords were big and heavy and sharp, that they were made out of, metal, that they were cold to the touch, that they were weapons of war? Is that the important thing here? Or is it that you’ve got something that is ornately decorated and was designed to show wealth? So, it’s about questions you’re communicating and how the best way to do that is.
Sophie 07:35
Yeah, the life of a Medieval knight doesn’t feel particularly appealing to me looking at the assumed weight of all that armour, [laughing] and particularly those swords, so that is certainly something I would love to know more about. And I think this is where, as you said, Charlotte, this work will really shine. I think it’s giving people new avenues into all of these collections, which is so exciting. And I think for us as practitioners, to start thinking in different ways too, which is not an easy task, but something that hopefully will really open your mind to, to different ways that you can start engaging people in understanding and enjoying and experiencing all that your collections have to offer.
Charlotte 08:17
Exactly, hopefully, thinking in a multisensory way will open up the way that you think about your collections and how you can communicate those collections to your visitors. I’ve been Charlotte Slark.
Sophie 08:28
I’ve been Sophie Vohra.
Charlotte 08:30
Thank you for listening to The Sensational Museum, Sensational Shorts Podcast.
[The podcast ends with The Sensational Museum audio logo. A conspiratorial female voice says ‘The Sensational Museum’. Lower in volume, almost distant, people are chattering excitedly in a large, echoey space. A warm, major chord chimes and fades out]