Take an online field trip to the
Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), an independent museum founded in London in 2015, now based in Portsmouth, UK! This unique museum collects, preserves, and exhibits sounds as objects of culture, offering its visitors a listening-based experience that’s been featured in publications like Atlas Obscura, Londonist.com, and Curator: The Museum Journal.
MOPS encourages its visitors to make an appointment to listen to sounds that may otherwise slip through the cracks, to give attention to sounds that exist beyond music – as objects indelibly connected to our lives and our world. Containing 30 galleries filled with 325 objects (over nine hours of material) located within four main topical categories – Natural History, Science & Technology, Architecture & Urban Design, and Art & Culture – this museum presents sounds in a whole new light.
This field trip, led live online from the UK by MOPS Director and Chief Curator John Kannenberg, will present a special 20-minute tour of MOPS collection highlights – from the first recording of a human voice (made before Edison’s phonograph!) to a malfunctioning MacBook, from pink river dolphins chuckling in the Amazon to the flush of Sigmund Freud’s toilet at his house in Vienna – you’ll experience a whirlwind of audible culture that will make you laugh, make you wonder, and hopefully make you think a little differently about what a museum can be in the 21st century.
