Derick Armah
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
NEO Lab Fellowship
Working with a leading German design museum to create a digital prototype named Mood Music, addressing public learning and accessibility through emotional intuition. From April to October 2022, and then again from April to May 2023.
A total of five pairs of creative practitioners were selected for MK&G Hamburg’s NEO Lab Fellowship, with each duo choosing to address an intervention about audience accessibility. I paired with writer and critic Tara Okeke to “enable users to add ideas and stories to the collections to include multiple viewpoints”, working remotely.
Tara and I opted towards the centuries-old musical instrument collection as the focus of our intervention, motivated by aural storytelling traditions and cultural transmission through music. We devised Mood Music as means of sense-making, which allowed museum visitors to use their own emotional intuition to explore the collection, engaging with the archive as active, not inert heritage objects, still capable of interaction and cultural production.
By having visitors listen the music from the archived instruments, rather than passively view them, we activated the objects, drawing out the emotional resonance that many people associate with music. By then allowing visitors to map their emotional responses to the music on to the objects, the concept provided a novel means of navigating and learning from the collection. By thereafter allowing visitors to record their personal spoken anecdotes on to the collection’s music, Mood Music generated a digital output that combined aurality and musical storytelling, growing the collection with additional material.
Ultimately, Mood Music arose from our insights as storytellers, and our understandings that accounts of history are shaped by subjective experiences, which form a record of emotional truth that ought to be engaged seriously. Additionally, through the concept, we imagined music as a means for diverse audiences to translate themselves through musical culture, letting the sonic experience become the place of convergence.
Following delivery, two of the five pairs were invited to the museum in Hamburg in order to develop to the concepts into digital prototypes. As one of the selected pairs, Tara and I were able to engage with the musical instrument collection in person, collaborating with creative technologist Gloria Shultz to bring Mood Music to life.
Mood Music and the wider NEO Lab Fellowship featured in a special edition print publication by MK&G Hamburg, detailing the museum’s pioneering work around digital collections.