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The traveling exhibition Wild Music: Sounds & Songs of Life resulted from a partnership among the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), and the Music Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, with funding from NSF (DRL-0407373). An exploration of the biological origins of the musical instinct, the exhibition began its national tour in 2007.

It was important to the Wild Music team that an exhibition about the deep roots and universality of music be broadly accessible and offer a rich and positive sonic experience. Planning an exhibition about music and sound would be a challenge, they knew. But from the beginning, they approached this as an opportunity—in particular, an opportunity to enrich the experience for visitors who are blind or have low vision.

Walter Waranka, an employment consultant and president of the Minnesota chapter of the American Council of the Blind who had earlier participated in an NSF-funded ASTC Accessible Museum Practices workshop, was engaged to serve as a member of the planning team. His regular participation helped maintain a focus on the experiences of people with disabilities. With Waranka’s advice, the developers devised an array of strategies for interpreting sounds. These included

• Braille and acoustic labels. Standardized locations make these easy to locate.
• Tactile relief models. In one exhibit, for example, whale models are associated with buttons that activate different species’ songs.
• Tactile diagrams. In an exhibit about animal vocalization, visitors can select a tactile sonogram of a bird, mammal, or insect song and insert it into a slot, activating an audio recording.
• Experiences of sound as vibration. A spectrum analyzer that works through vibrating metal reeds allows visitors to both feel and see that single sounds are often composed of several frequencies. In the exhibition’s small theater, “bass shaker” speakers bolted under the seats let visitors feel low-frequency parts of the soundtrack, while limiting the spread of these hard-to-contain sounds into the rest of the exhibit space.
• Visual representations of sound. In a working model of a larynx, a fan blows low-pressure air through rubber flaps. By pulling on a control knob, visitors can stretch the flaps and bring them together, producing a sound that varies in pitch with the tension applied. Strobe LEDs help visitors see how vibrations make the sounds they hear—or to see sounds they can’t hear.

Prototypes were critiqued by other consultants who had developed exhibits with people who are deaf and hard of hearing, then tested during a prototyping session attended by members of several Twin Cities groups that represent people who have personal and professional experience with disabilities.

In evaluation carried out after the exhibition was complete, visitors reported that they appreciated the tactile experiences and the presence of Braille and acoustic labels, even though most had not used these features themselves. Consultant Wally Waranka reported that Wild Music was the first exhibition he had felt able to navigate and enjoy almost entirely on his own—he even brought colleagues from the employment agency to visit, hoping to inspire their approach to workplace accommodations.

Web sites
www.wildmusic.org  
www.exhibitfiles.org/wild_music_sounds__songs_of_life  
www.exhibitfiles.org/pictures_of_sound

Photo courtesy Science Museum of Minnesota