The Sonic Object

The Silent Problem

When museum educators incorporate object-based learning (OBL), they engage students with objects from science, history, archaeology, and art. They don’t typically include musical instruments. When music educators plan their curricula, they talk about repertoire, notation, performance, and composition. They don’t consider musical instruments as objects.
Earlier this year, I began a doctoral research programme exploring OBL with musical instrument collections, and I’ve become intrigued by this double absence. Why have these two fields—both committed to active, embodied learning—failed to find each other?

The most obvious challenge is that musical instruments are made to be heard, but for the most part, museums keep them silent. OBL pedagogy has developed sophisticated approaches for engaging learners through touch, close observation, and material investigation (Chatterjee & Hannan, 2015). But what do you do with an object whose essential quality—sound—is typically inaccessible?

During initial stages of mapping over 100 UK musical instrument collections, it became apparent how this creates practical tensions. Take for example, a Mandinka balafon – visually striking with its carved wooden keys and calabash resonators. Behind glass, students can observe its materials, trace trade routes for the wood, observe decorative patterns. But they can’t hear it. They can’t feel the vibration through the wooden keys,
experience how different-sized resonators create pitch variations, or understand why this matters in Mande musical traditions (Charry, 2000).

Some collections use recordings, but there’s something fundamentally different about hearing a recording versus experiencing an instrument as a living sound-object. Others use replicas for hands-on sessions, but then we lose the authenticity that makes museum objects pedagogically powerful (Dudley, 2010). This sonic dilemma hasn’t been adequately theorised in OBL literature, which remains largely visual and tactile in its assumptions.

The Institutional Gap

Musical instrument collections also exist in a peculiar institutional position. They’re often curated by specialists—organologists, music historians, conservators—rather than education teams. Programming often defaults to music-historical narratives aimed at adult audiences: “Here’s how keyboard instruments evolved from harpsichord to fortepiano to piano.” Meanwhile, primary music teachers work almost entirely separately from museum resources. Their curricula focus on singing, notation, and basic instrumental skills using classroom instruments. The English National Curriculum for music expects pupils to ‘perform, listen to, review, and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles, and traditions’ (DfE, 2013), yet teachers report feeling underprepared to teach music from diverse traditions (Cain & Walden, 2019), rarely engaging with the material objects that embody those musical cultures.

The institutions that could bridge this gap—university museums, local heritage sites, specialist collections—often lack the educational staffing to develop systematic school programmes. Initial mapping from my research reveals huge variation: some collections have developed educational offerings; others remain essentially research collections with minimal public access. Many sit somewhere in between, with occasional school visits but no sustained programmes or pedagogical framework.

The Missing Opportunity

This matters particularly for primary-aged children, who have much to gain from object-based approaches. They’re at developmental stages where hands-on, multisensory learning is most effective. They’re developing cultural awareness and global understanding. Yet they’re almost entirely absent from musical instrument collection programming.

I recently observed a museum education programme in continental Europe where students could experiment with both acoustic and digital instruments in a dedicated discovery space. The facilitator encouraged students to explore freely—testing different playing techniques, comparing timbres, and building their own simple instruments. What struck me was how naturally students moved between sonic exploration (what sounds can this make?) and material investigation (why is it made this way?). A child comparing brass and woodwind instruments began theorising about why metal produces a brighter sound. Another examined the keys of a tuned percussion instrument and spontaneously connected their graduated sizes to pitch—a moment of genuine inquiry-driven discovery.

These moments felt significant, yet they emerged almost organically from the hands-on environment rather than being guided by an explicit pedagogical framework. This observation crystallised something for me: we lack established approaches for helping students navigate this sonic-material nexus—moving intentionally between experiencing instruments as sounding objects and as material culture.

The Intercultural Learning Opportunity

This gap feels most acute around intercultural music education. UK primary schools are expected to teach music from diverse traditions, but teachers report feeling underprepared. Meanwhile, museums hold thousands of instruments from global musical traditions – gamelan from Java, tabla from India, ouds from the Middle East—each embedded with cultural knowledge that’s made tangible through material form.

OBL could offer a way into this knowledge that’s fundamentally different from just listening. When students examine a Japanese shamisen, they encounter Japanese aesthetic principles in its spare elegance. When they trace the materials of a West African djembe—carved from lenké wood, headed with goatskin—they learn about West African craftsmanship traditions and resource use (Dawe, 2012). These aren’t supplementary facts; they’re intrinsic to the object’s cultural meaning.

But without pedagogical frameworks, these opportunities remain unrealised. We risk defaulting to tokenistic cultural ‘tourism’ rather than genuine inquiry and understanding (Hess, 2015). The OBL literature offers concepts like ‘slow looking’ (Tishman, 2018), and ‘boundary objects’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989) that encourage deeper cultural understanding, but they haven’t been translated into the musical domain for primary education. Katherine Palmer’s work at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix offers one practitioner-based approach to integrating ethnomusicology and museum education (Palmer, 2018), but such approaches remain rare, particularly in UK contexts.

The Research Journey

My research isn’t assuming OBL will simply “work” with musical instruments. Instead, I’m treating the pedagogical adaptation as a research question: What does it take to genuinely integrate these approaches into primary music education?

I’m starting with systematic mapping to understand what already exists and what barriers persist. Then I will conduct case studies of existing museum-school partnerships, seeking to understand what practitioners have learned. Eventually, I will be co-designing curriculum interventions with teachers and museum educators—not imposing frameworks but developing them collaboratively.

I’m particularly interested in how we bridge making, playing, and cultural investigation. Perhaps we need video documentation of instruments in cultural contexts. Perhaps we need careful combinations of authentic collection objects for observation and replica instruments for hands-on exploration (de Kluis et al., 2024). Perhaps activities should explicitly move between sonic, material, and cultural ways of knowing.

The assessment question is genuinely puzzling: How do we know if this “works”? Musical skill development? Cultural understanding? Curiosity and engagement? All seem relevant but pull in different directions and demand different evaluative approaches.

An Invitation to Conversation

What’s becoming clear is that the absence of OBL in music education isn’t simple neglect – it reflects genuine practical and pedagogical challenges around sonic objects, institutional structures, and intercultural pedagogy. But the potential rewards are significant: more engaging music education, better use of museum resources, and new ways of developing intercultural competency.

I’m interested in hearing from others working at these intersections: What have you discovered? What pedagogical strategies have worked? What failures have been instructive? How do you navigate a sonic-material realm with objects?

Musical instruments deserve the same pedagogical attention as other museum objects. They’re not peripheral resources for specialists but potentially central tools for all students’ learning. The first step is naming the gap. The next is working together to fill it.

References

CAIN, M., & WALDEN, J. 2019. Musical diversity in the classroom: Ingenuity and integrity in sound exploration. British Journal of Music Education, 36(1),5-19.

CHARRY, E. 2000. Mande music: Traditional and modern music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

CHATTERJEE, H. J., & HANNAN, L. (eds.) 2015. Engaging the senses: Object-based learning in higher education. Routledge: London.

DAWE, K. 2012. The cultural study of musical instruments. In Clayton, M., Herbert, T., & Middleton, R. (eds.) The cultural study of music: A critical introduction (2nd ed.), Routledge: London. 195-205.

DE KLUIS, T., ROMP, S., & LAND-ZANDSTRA, A. 2024. Science museum educators' views on object-based learning: The perceived importance of authenticity and touch. SAGE Open 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625231202617

DEPARTMENT FOR EDUCATION. 2013. National curriculum in England: Music programmes of study. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-music-programmes-of-study

DUDLEY, S. H. 2010. Museum materialities: Objects, sense and feeling. In Dudley, S. H. (ed.) Museum materialities: Objects, engagements, interpretations, Routledge: London. 1-17.

HESS, J. 2015. Decolonizing music education: Moving beyond tokenism. International Journal of Music Education, 33(3),336-347.

PALMER, K. 2018. Instruments as objects in ethnomusicological museum learning. American Musical Instrument Society. https://www.amis.org/post/collectors-choice

STAR, S. L., & GRIESEMER, J. R. 1989. Institutional ecology, 'translations' and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19 (3), 387-420.

TISHMAN, S. 2018. Slow looking: The art and practice of learning through observation. Routledge: London.