San Francisco – May 26, 2026

Sound is everywhere, yet we rarely treat it as a subject in its own right. In this first edition of a series of roundtables, we explored how communities and institutions such as museums can be designed around listening, sonic memory, and shared soundscapes, and what a sound museum could make possible culturally, socially, and educationally.

Jason Reinier, speaker at the roundtable coined the term Sonostalgia, which describes sound longing: The way certain sounds and soundscapes carry comfort, memory, and meaning, and the impulse to preserve and share them. What happens when we put sound first, not as background, but as a primary way of knowing and experiencing?

San Francisco – Jun 23, 2026

In the second edition of the Sound Museum Roundtable series, we turned to sound and space: the relationship between the physical and the digital, the overlapping experiences that emerge as we move between them, and the role of storytelling and the science of sonification in expanding the idea of a Sound Museum.

Moderated by Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, the panel brought together three practitioners working at very different scales of sound and space. Nina Emge, a Zurich-based artist and member of the Transnational Sound Initiative, Chris Chafe, composer, cellist, and chair of Stanford’s Department of Music, and Christopher Salter, professor of Immersive Arts and director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts presented some of their works.

San Francisco – Jul 28, 2026

Where the first roundtable asked why listening matters and the second explored how environments support that listening, this closing session turned to the building itself.

Moderated by Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, the panel included Sarah Kenderdine, director of the Laboratory for Experimental Museology at EPFL, Bevin Savage Yamazaki, who leads Gensler’s Culture and Museums practice, and Barbara Nerness, a composer and researcher trained at CCRMA.

This event was part of our Creative Industries program. Swissnex in San Francisco has programming around academia, startups, creative industries, and AI & Tech Foresight.