Well, what can I say? Shock. Distinctly remembering multiple birthday parties in fourth grade in which Thriller was the only album we played; once we got to the end of a given side, we’d just flip that rekkid over and listen all over again.

My favorite moment of yesterday, though, came at the end of the Femi Kuti concert at the Prospect Park bandshell. As everyone began filing out, the sound guy had the bright idea to play “I’ll Be There” over the soundsystem. Several thousand people suddenly stopped in their tracks, and started singing together:

It was a beautiful moment, and one that sent actual chills down my spine. I wish you could hear the singing better in the recorded excerpt above, but you get the idea.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the cultural value of noise and chatter.

The first thing that got me thinking about this was David Bearman’s recent blog entry about the use of Twitter during the recently-concluded Museums and the Web conference. Almost nonstop Twittering from the conference participants led to the creation of a rich stream of data that was full of useful references, emotion, and nuance. There was no denying that Twitter was the star player at the conference, and that it fundamentally altered the way everyone at the conference interacted with one another. David’s post is interesting and, although admittedly written from the point of view of a (somewhat) converted skeptic, I still found myself extremely frustrated with his “list of useful tweets.” His list, in fact, removed everything from the tweet but the link contained therein, indicating that any of the contextual material or emotional content contained in the tweet itself was largely irrelevant.

The second thing that got me thinking about this was last week’s Arts, Culture, and Technology meetup here in New York, which featured an engaging presentation and conversation with SebChan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Among the many excellent initiatives that Seb has overseen there, one of the most interesting is the Powerhouse’s use of the Flickr Commons as a means of both providing increased access to images of collections objects to the public, as well as harvesting information (primarily tags) from those objects for use by the museum itself.

Seb talked about the need to filter user responses when the amount of those responses becomes so overwhelming that they become just so much noise. And although I think that both Seb and David are right to filter noise when this issue is looked at expressly as a problem of mining relevant/important information from user response, I wonder if we are missing a larger issue here by focusing on that exclusively. While even a cursory skim over the visitor responses for an image like this one from the Powerhouse Museum certainly brings back a paucity of immediately useful information (thanks for the “yeah cool!” shoutout, Orsek!) I have to wonder if we’d be so quick to dismiss these kinds of responses if they were from, say 1879, versus 2009.

What I mean here is that while we might have been just as quick to dismiss this kind of commentary as useless in 1879 as we are now, that same commentary, with the addition of 130 years, suddenly acquires immense cultural/historical value. As the famous evil archaeologist Rene Belloq once said, “Look at this [watch]. It’s worthless - ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless.”

I find just this little change in perspective suddenly makes this information appear significantly more valuable, at least in a cultural memory sort of way, than we’ve previously thought. Just imagine if a museum were able to present, alongside the object itself, a catalog of responses to the object from the public over time. How did people respond to this print in 1930 vs. 1950 vs. 1980? Are there trends over time? Do certain terms/phrases crop up and then disappear, while others are used consistently throughout time? I personally would find that hugely fascinating.

The problem, though, is that we tend to be so focused on extracting one type of value from information obtained via public channels (”useful” links from tweets, “valuable” commentary on images) that we end up discarding what might actually be, in the long run, the most useful information, namely cultural, emotional, and historical context. In the past, we were forced by necessity to focus on only the most immediately “useful” information, because we had limited ability to capture anything else. But now that we live in the future, where storage is cheap, there’s no reason for us to hold on to apparently “useless” information as well.

Doing this, of course, puts a museum in the position of having to be a custodian of public opinion in addition to its traditional role as a custodian of culture. This opens up an entirely new area (for museums, anyway) of scholarship–the collection, curation, and maintenance of public response. The good thing is that most museums already have someone who could naturally take on this role–the “social media” consultant (usually a part of the communications/marketing department) who typically manages a museums Flickr pages, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and so on. I could certainly imagine an expansion of that consultant’s role (which is often now seen as primarily a marketing function) to include curating public feedback, and archiving it in a useful way for future generations. “Noise” becomes cultural memory.

…because I’m on vacation and it’s time for me to get off of the computer and on the beach. The first thing is that I have a guest post up on Nina Simon’s Museum Two (2.0?) blog called “Language Matters.” It’s a collection of vaguely useful tips and tricks on how to sell technology projects to those who are not predisposed to doing them. It’s delivered in my standard rant format, so hopefully it’s entertaining.

Another thing that I’ve been loving lately is the “Museum Pipes” blog, written by my colleague at the Met, Piotr Adamczyk. Piotr is pushing the boundaries of what might be done with museum data when it’s exposed via APIs and pushed through Yahoo Pipes. As making collections data available this way moves from being exceptional to ordinary over the next year, it’s good that people like Piotr are already figuring out how to do more. Check his site out; it’s the jam. You’ll need an API key from the Brooklyn Museum to test many of the pipes.

Also, if you haven’t checked out the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s ArtBabble yet, go there right now. So awesome. It’s currently still by invitation only, but I have a few beta invites left; contact me if you’d like one.

Also, last thing: in a few short weeks, I’ll be heading to London for the second of two design sessions around the ConservationSpace project. If you’re in the neighborhood, and would like to hang out a bit, lemme know.

That is all.

Just a short post today, in between working on lots and lots of things. I’ve had the good fortune to be asked by a friend of mine to score a short (three minutes) animated film, and I thought I’d post some of what I’ve been working on to that end. I don’t think I can reveal too many details about the film itself at this point, so I’ll confine myself to talking about the music.

The director was looking for something relatively dissonant, or at least unsettling, for the main texture of the piece. To that end, I whipped out George Perle’s Twelve-Tone Tonality, which is, after 15 years of stealing (and mostly misusing) its ideas, still one of the most difficult/rewarding music theory texts I have ever read. Perle is so pithy that there’s nary a single wasted word in the entire text–every bit is crucial.

Aaaanyway, working from the “Inversionally Complimentary Cycles” section of the text, I worked out a tone row for the piece, and then transposed it into four additional voices, moving in parallel, which gave me some nice tonal blocks to play with. After orchestrating these blocks a bit with some sounds I liked, I recorded them and then cut up and arbitrarily pieced the shards back together, which produced the “glitchy” sounds you hear. I then worked out a little melody with an inversional relationship to the original row, and started flying that over the top. This is shaping up to be a fun little piece, methinks. Anyway, have a listen, and let me know what you think!

P.S., As I was writing this post, I found out that George Perle passed away in January at his home in Manhattan at age 93. To a guy like me, who’s still at heart a music theory geek, this was heartbreaking to learn. He will be missed.

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• George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93 (nytimes.com)

Eh, just because I can’t get enough of this particular subject, I thought I’d do another quick post ’bout mobile interpretation in museums. As I was gearing up to write the Future of Mobile Interpretation paper for this year’s Museums and the Web conference, I did a few informal surveys via both Twitter and Yammer to see if my gut feelings on multimedia/audio tours were even close to correct. The interesting side effect of this “flash survey” was that I found that microblogging platforms were a really interesting means of acquiring quick survey results, if you’re not interested in being particularly scientific (perhaps I’ll post more on that subject in the future). Primarily, though, I was pleasantly surprised at the thoughtfulness (and pithiness, given the format) of the responses. I thought I’d post them here, since some of my Twitter peeps have expressed some desire to see the results of my survey. So basically, I asked the question, “To those of you who don’t pick up audio guides in museums, why is that?” A random sampling of the responses follows:

Most people and especially younger ones carry in their pockets much more powerful appliances (i.e. cellphones)… I can do much more about getting intersting information with a blackberry, palm or iphone by typing in name of the artist or work or genre in wikipedia.

With audio guides if you are wearing headphones, then you are disconnected for a time from the person you came in with, while you otherwise would be possibly discussing the artwork. I think there is something to audio guides being exclusively one way interaction device, apart from entering numbers.

audio guides make a museum experience feel too solitary.

Talking too slow for saying too little.

Cause I like to do things at my own pace, choose which info to absorb (I rarely read entire labels), and hear the surroundings.

Not usually for the main collection, yes for special exhibits, if it’s free and the crowd isn’t nuts. Probably because of where the guides are handed out – at the controlled entrance to the special exhibit. generally, special exhibits have a single path, so i’m thinking linearly & the guide can build a narrative, whereas in the main [galleries] I like to wander and anything gleaned from the guide will be a one-off. That said, if the guide was, already in my pocket in the shape of my mobile phone, I’d be more likely to call up info on a particular piece in the main [galleries].

I’m not usually at a museum by myself, and I want to have a shared experience with whomever I’m with. Headphones disrupt that.

Because I don’t like things in my ears.

I think we can glean a few things, even from a small sample like this one. The first (and I point this out in my paper) is that museums really don’t know much about this new audience. What studies have been done (in particular Peter Samis’s excellent survey of visitor response to the Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint interpretive devices) are largely analyses of visitor preference between given devices, and don’t therefore tell us much about the majority of our audience that never picks up a device in the first place.

The follow-on from this, then, is of course that museums don’t yet know whether the approaches they currently employ in the development of interpretive technology strategies in galleries will produce results that satisfy this new audience. Given that most multimedia handheld devices in museums still employ what is basically an audio tour model adapted to a new device, my assumption (particularly in light of the kinds of responses like the ones above) is that this will not be the case. It’s time to figure out a new way.

Before I leave this post to go catch up on some Battlestar Galactica, I thought I’d point towards a few interesting resources. The first is a post from New Curator with a discussion about iPhone apps that might be useful for museums. Another is the Museums and Mobile Adoption Survey by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Of particular interest to me were the responses to the “Are you evaluating visitor usage of the device?” question. And lastly, but never leastly, the Mattress Factory dudes have made excellence happen again in the form of an aggregated MF Twitter feed viewable in the MF’s gallery space. Aside from this just being a great idea, I point to it because I mentioned making something similar to this available via handheld devices in the MW paper, and it’s nice to see this already happening. Word.