A subject in a world full of objects

"A Subject in a World Full of Objects" is a brief liaison (around St. Valentine’s Day 1977) between a collection of European musical boxes and a slightly jaded gentleman archivist. The devices he is tasked with recording served as elegant salon entertainment for social occasions, aided musical democratisation and were vessels for cherished memories, and carry a huge weight of human stories within them.

Wrangling a reel-to-reel tape deck and microphone, our archivist removes the collection from stasis one by one, noting their type, condition and the artisan or company that constructed them. His day is crowded by a rich litany of sounds - pieces of music punched on metal discs and cylinders, the creaking of wooden cases, reed combs, organ bellows, latches, hand-cranks, whistles, mechanical birds, traffic. He documents them phlegmatically in all their tinkling, jangling, hooting, chiming, clattering glory.

The piece uses no sound sources other than the original recording - the instruments in joyous, discordant reanimation and wistful sentimentality juxtaposed by the reserved tones of a man impervious to their charms. I hope it is a whimsical tribute to the museum's collection, to the people who preserve it, and to our collective cultural fascination with nostalgia, music and mechanics.

Musical boxes and cylinders reimagined by Emmy Lambert.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds