The National Science and Media Museum has officially launched #SonicFriday, an online project that collects people’s memories related to sound, music and sound technologies. Over the next few weeks, the museum’s social media channels—Twitter, Facebook and Instagram—will host a collaborative story of sound culture: from your sonic experience during the lockdown to vinyl culture, from your first CD to digital sampling, from your favourite train soundtrack to the role that audio cassettes played in developing your musical tastes.
Each Friday the museum will propose a different theme and invite everyone to participate, commenting the social media posts with personal musical memories and sound stories!
The project has two main goals. Firstly, we want to find new ways to make people interact with the Sound Technologies collection online. Secondly, we’d like to expand the narratives around the museum objects, including people’s stories. This is why all social media contributions will be collected and become part of blog posts, collaborative playlists, future exhibitions and a lot more! The campaign is also part of a PhD project exploring the relationship between museums and online sound culture.
Our first museum playlist
In honour of the Walkman’s anniversary on 1 July, we dedicated last week’s #SonicFriday to the cassette player.
We ended up with more than 100 comments. It was wonderful to see people sharing their musical memories, from favourite children’s songs to the first tape bought as teen. The audio cassette was the faithful companion of many car journeys—and how funny it was to remember rewinding the tape with a pencil!
One of our PhD students sent us this video of her fisher price cassette player that still works!
Who knew the intro to the tape version of Cinderella was such a bop? #SonicFriday pic.twitter.com/evjBwsJzez
— National Science and Media Museum (@MediaMuseum) July 3, 2020
My older brother got me to chip in my saved up pocket money so that together, we could buy his friend’s brother’s extra copy of Nevermind on cassette. Which, as it turns out, was a pivotal moment in my musical life 🤘https://t.co/uXLlvUxbqj
— 🏴☠️ Mike Perry 🏴☠️ (@michaelguyperry) July 3, 2020
Between Facebook, Twitter and Instagram we assembled a four-hour playlist! You can listen to it on our Spotify channel.
Get ready for upcoming Sonic Fridays…
Let’s start preparing for the next #SonicFriday! On 17 July the theme is ‘Sounds of my quarantine’ and we would love to hear about your sonic experience during the lockdown. On 24 July, it will be the turn of ‘I love digital sampling’ and we will celebrate one of the key objects of the Sound Technologies collection: the Fairlight CMI!
Plus there are many more to come! Follow the museum on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram to keep updated.
How to join in
Join us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. You can either comment in response to our #SonicFriday posts or share your stories by using the hashtag #SonicFriday and tagging us. We can’t wait to discover your music memories!
If you’d like more information about the project, please email Stefania Zardini Lacedelli at szl1@le.ac.uk. If you are curious to discover more about #SonicFriday online volunteering, please fill out this form!
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