The Sounding Object

Set with the task of giving an object in the V&A a voice, my project partner and I decided to sonify the Norfolk House music room, found in the British Galleries. We wanted to make this project about the voice of the museum and the people whose voice will be a new element of the V&A’s story with the addition of the V&A East location. Focusing on bringing the voices of Stratford residents to the original SW7 location, we created an interactive, sound generating code. We hoped that this could turn into a data/opinion collection process to communicate residents opinions about the move and maybe use them to influence the design of V&A East.

The code we created presents a screen filled with balls or ‘blips’ as we called them (left). Users control the biggest pink blip with their hand and sound is generated with each blip collision. To create our soundscape we used Grime samples, a sound native to Stratford, and projected these sounds into Kensington’s Norfolk House Music Room. A big part of this project was to meld the two cultures of Stratford and Kensington and ensure that ‘old’ Stratford wasn’t being forgotten in the development of the Olympic Park’s new East Bank. Instead of giving a voice to an object we used an object to expand the ‘voice’ of the museum to include its new neighbours.