The Museum of Music presents the exhibition ‘Mediterranean Voices’, a study of the voice, one of the most important intangible aspects of human heritage. It is this season’s main exhibition and will be installed in the external access area of L’Auditori in Carrer Lepant, occupying an area of over 200 m2. This exhibition confirms the commitment of the Museum and L’Auditori to be open to the city of Barcelona. Entry to the exhibition is free and it can be seen until 26 July.
The exhibition follows a non-linear route through seven different spaces. The first spaces examine the artifice of the voice, the variety of languages and their historic continuity using entertaining, interactive media, while the central part of the exhibition presents the voice as the creator of social situations. The discussion takes shape at this point and invites visitors to reflect on the ideas presented. The space dedicated to markets immerses the visitor in sound. A homage to the destroyed city of Aleppo leads to a thoughtful critique on the conflicts and paradoxes of the Mediterranean today. On leaving, visitors can leave a recording of their own voice as a “sound signature” to be added to that of all the other visitors.
Extensive research
The audiovisual recordings in the exhibition are the fruit of extensive original field work. It includes extracts from over 80 hours of filming carried out between August 2008 and February 2014 in some twenty locations around the Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Malaga, from Tunisia to Crete, and sound recordings from the Balkans (Croatia, Albania, Montenegro), Syria, Turkey and Morocco, among others. Visitors can witness a total of about fifty everyday situations and hear up to 300 different voices.
An exhibition to experience
The exhibition, “Voices of the Mediterranean” is designed to allow visitors to directly experience and witness over fifty everyday moments. It is intended to be a sensory experience that connects directly to our emotions, and so it was decided not to subtitle the voices heard in the exhibition. The show also contains an interactive element that allows visitors to play with their own voices, discovering their timbre, depths and heights, and observing the real-time graphic representations generated by sonographs, spectrographs and melographs. At the end of the exhibition visitors are invited to leave a “sound signature” as a record of their visit. The voices recorded will be represented on a map as drops of water filling the Mediterranean. Everyone will be able to listen to their own recording and those of others.