ABSTRACT
Sound has not traditionally been an audible component of the display of psychiatric collections. Museum collections have been primarily understood to comprise the conspicuous arrangement of silent material culture that refl ects and privileges the visual traces of past institutional life from the perspective of staff, and only very rarely from the experiences of patients. The act of collecting, however, has been more inclusive and sound artefacts-by this I mean objects, such as pianos and radios, which generate sound-as well as sports equipment that generated an interactive soundscape between players and spectators, have been selected and incorporated into collections. But often these items are simply ironically grouped as the now silent visual evidence of ‘recreation’. Yet what these Bakelite radio sets, seventy-eight revolutions per minute records, pianola rolls, amplifi ers, cinematographs and sound recording equipment actually represent is more than just visual reminders of the chronological history of technology and its adoption over time within the asylum; instead, these objects also remind us of the regulated soundscape of asylum life. Therefore, these sound artefacts can amplify for museum audiences one of the many aspects of a gendered landscape and life controlled by medical staff and experienced by patients and staff alike. Within the walls of the asylum, everyday recreational objects were adopted and adapted to assist the colonial medical project that attempted to contain, control and ultimately cure patients within the extraordinary world of the asylum. They also allow us to ‘hear’ aspects of the gendered sounds found in the outside world that were used as regulated forms of recreation within the soundscape of the twentieth-century mental hospital.
