The ‘Soundscapes’ exhibition comprised six paintings displayed individually in darkened rooms, each ‘accompanied’ by a specially composed piece played over loudspeakers. The seven artists (two working as a duo) invited to create musical responses represented a cross-section of disciplines, from wildlife recording, sound installation, film composition, DJing and instrumental composition, and, it must be said, all had some crowd-pulling potential. Given the reviews, one might have expected to discover unspeakable things happening in the depths of the National Gallery; however, I found it to be an interesting and well-executed exhibition which presented some thoughtful sonic responses to great paintings.

At first listen, Jamie xx, DJ, producer and member of the band The xx, had composed a response to Théo van Rysselberghe's Coastal Scene which was much like many of his other neon, synthy, pop creations. But, as one moved through the room, Ultramarine's dense cloud of sound broke apart into detailed, spatialised clusters, a clever play on the pointillist techniques used in the painting.

Canadian sound art duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, working with Antonello da Messina's St Jerome in his Study, went slightly beyond the brief by building a large, scale model of the study and surrounding it with a collection of pastoral sounds. These seemed to me too hectic in comparison with the stillness of the painting, but even so there was a sort of uncanny spatial effect created when one leaned in to look inside the model: I was left with the strange and rather uncomfortable feeling that I had been eavesdropping.

Chris Watson, the renowned wildlife sound recordist, provided the most straightforwardly ‘soundscapey’ response of the six. He accompanied Gallen-Kallela's Lake Keitele with the sound of waves, distant bird song and wind whistling through trees. It was technically accomplished but did seem a slightly simple response.

Nico Muhly's music encircled The Wilton Diptych, played over a ring of eight suspended loudspeakers. Bowed strings and percussion formed fractal patterns that held my attention, but as a whole his piece seemed quite separate from the diptych itself.

Oscar-winning film composer Gabriel Yared seemed to have imagined that Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses was actually a moving image, and accordingly he composed a fin-de-siècle soundtrack featuring piano, clarinet and female vocalist.

Susan Philipsz chose the famous Holbein painting The Ambassadors, a complex painting, which Philipsz responded to with a simple piece composed of sustained violin notes. It was, for me, the most successful of the new works. Played over multiple loudspeakers, the notes moved in the space around me, overlapping to create slowly shifting and unpredictable harmonies. Philipsz deliberately chose not to record a lute or viol to avoid anything too obviously historical, and the effect of her work was as tense and unsettling as the painting itself. Unlike some of the other soundscapes, Philipsz's managed to draw something out of the Holbein, so that I felt as if what I heard sharpened my focus when looking at the painting.

The technical execution of the exhibition made an enormously positive contribution: footsteps and chatter were muffled by acoustic baffles on the walls; the audio was played over loudspeakers carefully positioned with respect to the spatial character of each piece; visitors made their way between rooms through specially constructed tunnels so that each soundscape was properly separated. This level of care and attention to acoustic design does not always happen in exhibitions, even those involving lots of works with sound, and yet it can mean the difference between success and failure.

So then, if the exhibition had several positive elements, why all the terrible reviews? One critic titled his review ‘Jamie xx and friends make pointless soundtracks to paintings’ and summarised it as ‘a terrifyingly insecure cultural cringe of an exhibition’;Footnote ¹ others denounced it as ‘feeble and wrong-headed’,Footnote ² regretting that the paintings had been ‘interrupted by sonic interlopers’.Footnote ³ Notably, the majority of the critics cover the visual arts rather than music, but it seems to me that the way the exhibition was billed by the National Gallery might be partly responsible for the negative response, and may have led some critics to be offended on behalf of the paintings before they even arrived.

First, let's consider the title: in the worlds of sound and art, ‘soundscape’ is an overused term with its own sort of bandwagon, which doesn't particularly mean anything other than ‘there will be some sound here’. I don't think the National Gallery did themselves any favours by using this word. Secondly, the excitable tagline ‘Hear the Painting, See the Sound’ may be pleasingly neat but is somewhat empty, and rather gives the impression that paintings are unable to stimulate memories or ideas of sound by themselves.

A more accurate (though admittedly less catchy) description of this exhibition would have been something like, ‘let's see what happens when a fairly random selection of music creators responds to paintings in the way they know best’. These masterpieces clearly do not require the assistance of loudspeakers to make themselves heard, but this doesn't mean that the endeavour is any less interesting. The National Gallery and curator Minna Moore Ede deserve credit for producing an unusual and thought-provoking exhibition. It's important to remember that no paintings were harmed in the making of ‘Soundscapes’.