I've been part of a project at National Museum Wales called Ymateb, or Respond depending on your language of choice.

I invited musicians living and working in Wales to produce an original piece of music inspired by the Museum's collections in an effort to find new ways of engaging new audiences.

The music produced is then made available as free downloads from the Museum website so that visitors to the Museum can listen via their mp3 players (or whatever) to the music inspired by the collections they are visiting.

By the end of the year there should be around 20 tracks online which relate to all the Museums in the National Museum family, covering all areas of the collections.

What I was most interested in discovering, was how an abstracted form of expression that relies so heavily on emotional association, would interpret information rooted in hard fact.

As a songwriter, I had written my own response to working with an archaeologist surveying Bronze Age burial sites in north Wales.

I found myself concerned with the emotional investment those distant ancestors made in building those tombs which was somewhat removed from the surveying work I had undertaken, so I was interested to see how other musical minds might interpret wisdom imparted from a curator.

Mostly, I wanted to see what happened when you mixed music with museums and I'm pretty pleased with the results so far - there's a link below for you to follow and make your own mind up about that though.....like it or not, it's all free...

http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/music09/respond

Part of my work at the Museum is to find engaging and inspiring ways of presenting information from the collections.

To me the links between theatre and museums are obvious, but not often drawn together, so I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who would be interested in finding a way to make that happen.