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"As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum practice have focused on providing audiences with multisensory experiences. Books such as 2014's The Multisensory Museum present preliminary strategies by which museums might help visitors engage with collections using senses beyond the visual. In this article, an overview of the multisensory roots of museum display and an exploration of the shifting definition of 'object' leads to a discussion of Pierre Schaeffer's musical term objet sonore - the 'sound object', which has traditionally stood for recorded sounds on magnetic tape used as source material for electroacoustic musical composition. A problematic term within sound studies, this article proposes a revised definition of 'sound object', shifting it from experimental music into the realm of the author's own experimental curatorial practice of establishing The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution dedicated to the collection and display of sounds as cultural objects. Utilising Brian Kane's critique of Schaeffer, Christoph Cox and Casey O'Callaghan's thoughts on sonic materialism, Dan Novak and Matt Sakakeeny's anthropological approach to sound theory, and art historian Alexander Nagel's thoughts on the origins of art forgery, this article presents a new working definition of the sound object as a museological (rather than a musical) concept."

"Museum of Sound is a project held in National Museum in Krakow consisting of various actions using sound. We are used to watching art in museums, perceiving it though sight. We forget how important it is to listen to it. Sound can extract unusual stories and revive objects. The first element of the project is Sound Microscope - an interactive sound installation open from March 2013 in the Gallery of Decorative Art in the Main Building of National Museum in Krakow, 1st floor. National Museum's Gallery of Decorative Art is the biggest exposition in Poland - it shows everyday life in Poland and Western Europe from the early Middle Ages up until Art Nouveau. Exhibits that so far have been locked in cabinets have now gained new life thanks to Museum of Sound project. Now, visiting a museum consists of not only watching objects from the past, but also listening to their story."

"The Museum of Portable Sound is a portable museum dedicated to portable sound, currently based in London, UK. The Museum's galleries exist as digital files located on the Museum Director's mobile phone - due to copyright concerns, we are unable to distribute all of our objects online. Displays of our permanent collection are augmented with an ongoing series of rotating exhibits in our Exposition Space."

"As visitors strolled through a recent display of Madame de Pompadour's coffee grinder, an 1840s Sèvres porcelain coffee set, tea canisters, sugar bowls and other European decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the scent of roasted coffee beans arose in one room. Bach's "Coffee" Cantata played in the background. Not far away, cocoa pods were not only on display but also meant to be touched. In the final gallery, a tasting station offered two kinds of liquid chocolate, one adapted from an Aztec recipe and the other from an 18th-century French formula. Museums usually aim to offer a feast for the eyes, but this Detroit museum had much more in mind for "Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate," which just closed at the institute. Officials, who used art objects to illustrate how the introduction of those beverages to Europe in the 16th century from Africa, Asia and the Americas changed social and consumption patterns, wanted the exhibition to be a banquet for all five senses."

Locative audio experience at the Brooklyn Museum. "In times of global surveillance scandals, purported no-spy agreements and increasing numbers of whistleblower platforms, with Top Secret International (State 1) Rimini Protokoll enter the global web of state secrets and secret services - the state within the state. In the first part of the tetralogy, which will deal with post-democratic phenomena for two years, an algorithm and a smartphone turn audience members into inconspicuous agents. Playing the role of journalists, visitors will listen in on investigations by foreign intelligence services, put themselves in the shoes of a whistleblower or be fitted with a legend. Between statues in a museum, they can hardly be singled out from other museum visitors. Using subtle gestures, purposeful movements, they access files and archives that open gradually; biographies from politics, journalism and espionage, globally active individuals with security clearance and activists mark out the playing field. The audience members watch and track one another, contact one another, form coalitions or refuse to connect."

Kathryn Walter is a Canadian artist who maintains a studio practice that intersects visual art, design and material culture. She operates the FELT studio as a laboratory to explore modern industrial felt through exhibitions, historical research, architectural commissions and a product line. Influenced by her background in sculpture, Walter has created a body of work ranging from intimate artworks to large-scale installations. She has collaborated with architects and created felt walls for residential, institutional and commercial sites including Google (Montreal), Red Bull (Toronto), The Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles); and CUNY Law School and The New School (New York). Walter has shown her work in exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto) and the Cooper Hewitt Nation Design Museum (New York). She received a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art and Design (Vancouver) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal). She lives and works in Toronto. www.feltstudio.com

"Bells ring, but it's not your grandmother calling you to dinner from the backyard. Bells ring and people shout, but it's not in a train station. Bells ring, people shout and a motorcycle whizzes by. Cars honk. "Dolla dolla dolla," the hawkers call. Despite standing in an underground gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., visitors are instantly transported to the Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, through Emeka Ogboh's sound art installation, "Market Symphony." Open through Sept. 24, this is the museum's first sound-art installation, thanks to curator Karen Milbourne, who has a special interest in sound art. Ogboh appeals directly to only one of the five senses-hearing-to re-create the atmosphere of an open-air market. Upending the traditional museum visitor experience presents several opportunities."

"At this point, I should mention what I have neglected to say. Top Secret uses an algorithmic Bluetooth device that tracks your coordinates in the museum, sending you further information and instructions based on your location. This also means that when the voice in your headphone asks you a question, you can respond by moving in certain ways or relocating to specific areas in the galleries. For example, you may be asked to answer a question by walking to the other end of a gallery or waving your notebook (which Top Secret provides you with in the air above your head. "

"Those without disabilities might not notice the innovations, but a museum in London is winning plaudits for its design and content."

"this immersive audiovisual installation combines the actual sounds of iconic New York interiors, such as Grand Central Terminal and the Seagram Building lobby, with visual animations projected on a panoramic screen. Grand Central Terminal's soundscape, for example, features an oceanic-style animation with clangs, echoes, and quick crescendos of intensity, transporting the listener to the midst of the station's daily bustle, and amplifying its status as a primary transportation portal to and from New York City. Visitors can also experience the soundscapes of Rockefeller Center, the New York Public Library Reading Room, and the Guggenheim Museum."

"Over the past 40 years "sound art" has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its first significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The first instance of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new form. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized space in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward's work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the voice in order to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator as well as the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this important exhibition has been marginalized in the current discourse."

"Listening Desk is an interactive sound sculpture that invites people to access and create soundscapes with sound archives. It is installed at 10 locations around the UK: Archives+ in Manchester Central Library; Cumbria Archives in Carlisle Archive Center; Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne; Norfolk Record Office; The British Library outside the King's Library; The National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow;  Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales; The Wellbeing Collection at University of Sussex Library; Ulster Transport Museum, Cultra, County Down, Ireland; and University of Leicester in Sir Bob Burgess Building."

"Elements including lights, sounds, and crowded spaces can overload some individuals' senses and trigger physical pain or emotional distress.  "

"It's an exciting time to be a composer or sound artist. Innovations in and new connections between methodology, technology and creative practice are creating a host of new possibilities for the sonic exploration of experience. NOVARS, the Research Centre for Electro Acoustic Composition and Sound Art at the University of Manchester work at the cutting edge of this new territory. So what are these developments? To keep it simple here we will talk about two, both of which relate to space."

"It wasn't quite as Earth-shaking as Marconi's 1901 cross-Atlantic radio transmission or Alexander Graham Bell yapping at this assistant on the first telephone call in 1876, but this week the 21st century got its inaugural transatlantic scent message. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York on Tuesday, the smell of champagne and chocolate wafted from the new "oPhone" in a message sent from Le Laboratoire art center in Paris."

"New York is hosting its first retrospective of the Belgian-born artist Carsten Höller, at the city's New Museum. Over a twenty-year career Höller has explored themes such as childhood, love and safety by creating playful and disorientating pieces "

"UK chemists even followed their noses to the Tate, where they tested three decades-old plastic sculptures."

Are jee be? Haroon Mirza - Irish Museum of Modern Art

"To produce The Met's first 3-D audio experience-an immersive tour integral to the current exhibition Visitors to Versailles (1682-1789)-my team and I entirely rethought the idea of a typical audio tour. Our goal? To bring alive the actual experiences of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visitors to Versailles. "