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| Visitors listen to recordings of traditional funeral songs at the permanent exhibit of Seoul Museum of Korean Folk Music, Nov. 21. / Korea Times photo by Lee Suh-yoon |
New museum and modern history exhibit in Seoul harness the medium of sound
By Lee Suh-yoon
Walking through the new Seoul Museum of Korean Folk Music does not require a power-reading session of endless dates and summaries.
Everything is by ear. "Minyo," or "people's songs," drift from a constellation of speakers installed on the walls. Some speakers are fixed into drawers that one must pull out to get the song started, while others are in handheld metal cups tied to interactive boards.
Minyo was the songs of the working-class population. Passed down orally, the songs developed over centuries to accompany particular settings and lifestyles. Subgenres include lullabies, children's play songs, harvest holiday songs, funeral rites songs and, of course, work songs, used to break the monotony of hard manual labor in rice paddies and fishing boats.
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| A selection of labor songs is visible on an interactive wall with handheld speakers at the Seoul Museum of Korean Folk Music. / Korea Times photo by Lee Suh-yoon |
Like other folk songs around the world, familiar melodies are repeated over the entire song. Call-and-response forms appear in jointly sung ones like work songs. Many songs are dark and mournful, lamenting on the misfortunes of a hard life.
"What happened to our fortunes? Making us board a boat to make a living," goes one phrase in a fisherman's song.
The archive opened on Nov. 21, one of over a dozen new museums commissioned under Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon, now in his third term.
"It is a pleasure to open the first museum that stores the sound of ordinary working-class people," the mayor said at the opening ceremony. "Minyo is not something created on the spot by a single composer. It is collectively created by our people over the years, reflecting the joys and sorrows of life."
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| At a first-floor resting area at the Seoul Museum of Korean Folk Music, visitors can listen to a selection of folk music from different regions while enjoying the view. / Korea Times photo by Lee Suh-yoon |
The museum could also host folk songs from other parts of Asia in the future, Park added.
Spanning three floors ― including two underground levels ― the museum is located in a newly built hanok in front of Donhwa Gate of Changdeok Palace.
Another exhibition relying on the medium of sound is being held at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, which is about a 20-minute walk west from the folk music museum.
Titled "An Audible Witness to History," the temporary exhibit features symbolic recordings telling of the times from around 1930s, during the Japanese occupation, to present-day Korea.
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| A siren horn installed at the "Audible Witness to History" exhibit at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History replicates the sound of curfew signals that rang in the streets from the late days of the Japanese occupation until 1982. / Korea Times photo by Lee Suh-yoon |
Like the folk music museum, the exhibit offers an auditory experience, taking visitors back in time with recordings of news reports, interviews and speeches marking key events in Korean history. These include independence activists speaking to a March 1 Independence Movement anniversary event crowd, a radio report alerting people of the start of the Korean War, the 1968 Cliff Richard concert in Seoul, and the shaking voices of laid-off bank employees during the Asia Financial Crisis at the end of the 1990s.
Suk Ji-hoon, an Asian History Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, dug up one of the audio files presented here from the archives of Bibliotheque Nationale de France ― a 1928 recording of the pioneering Korean linguist Yi Geuk-ro explaining the principles of Hangeul.
He says sound is a powerful medium for storing history.
"Sound recordings are one of the most intimate methods of recording historic moments," he said. "It is literally capturing the physical energy of a particular moment and space."
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