Le musée résonnant — Quai Branly

This is the work you can’t photograph. For the first time, the permanent collections of the Musée du quai Branly — Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Americas — have a soundtrack: a permanent parcours sonore of music, voices, chants and field recordings that lets visitors hear the living dimension of objects museums usually show in silence.

The system runs 124 loudspeakers and vibrators across roughly 30 listening zones, playing some 150 sounds. Each one is triggered by presence — a sound rises as you approach an object — and played in random rather than looped order, so the floor never tips into cacophony. At permanent, whole-floor scale, the curators call it a first for the museum world.

Onlyview provided the show control behind it: orchestrating every diffusion point, sensor and cue so that a four-year, ethnographically rigorous soundscape plays reliably, every day, as a permanent installation. Invisible engineering in service of attention — sound that makes visitors stop and look longer.