An afternoon session with Rainbow Chan, the Grainger Museum, the Immigration Museum, DA Calf and DAMsmart.

Clockwise from left: Rainbow Chan (image by Leah Jing McIntosh), Moya McFadzean, DA Calf and Dr Heather Gaunt and Dr Anthony Lyons, of the University of Melbourne.

Wednesday afternoon at the 2021 ASRA conference sees a host of presentations centred around collection access and preservation, as well as the field recording landscape. Sydney-based musician, artist and academic Rainbow Chan will moderate the two sessions.

Dr Heather Gaunt and Dr Anthony Lyons, of the University of Melbourne, will talk about the Grainger Museum’s Living Instruments Project - a collaboration with the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music and Melbourne eResearch Group, School of Computing & Information Systems. The project involves mapping real instruments (by sampling their sound) to new tactile digital interfaces that anyone can use, and has resulted in significant student learning experiences and outcomes, creating over 20 new audio works from the recording and digital instrument making process.

Dr Moya McFadzean, Senior Curator, Migration & Cultural Diversity at the Museums Victoria, speaks about the three most recent exhibition projects at the Immigration Museum to raise some key ideas and issues relating to memory in the public sphere. The exhibitions demanded that the museum engage with notions of authenticity, trust, as well as methodologies of deep community engagement, and very different forms of visitor interactivity and immersion.

Sound artist D.A. Calf will speak on what field recording can tell us about the nature of sound and contested sites. The presentation will centre on process of field recording in relation to a coming-into-knowing, of figuring out oneself and one’s surroundings through the act of directing listening devices, and how this can contribute to our understanding of sound.

Finally, Andrew Martin from DAMsmart will share observations on the impact of impacts of COVID on audiovisual digitisation projects, and provide some considerations for digitising AV media.

This afternoon session will provide plenty of food for thought, and a great midway point for the conference.