IN TUNE WITH NATURE PULSATING SOUNDTRACKS LIVEN UP MUSEUM'S HISTORICAL EXHIBITS.

Byline: Emmanuelle Soichet Staff Writer

It's Friday night at the Natural History Museum, and a 40,000-year-old ground sloth is in full roar, joined by a herd of pint-size dinosaurs and horses in a jumpy ``Lion King''-style polyphonic orgy, dreamt up by those 21st-century wildcats Ozomatli.

A few feet away, a 20-foot marine lizard - half-snake, half-crocodile - menacingly combs the ocean floor for lunch to the liquid beats of DJ Nobody.

And throughout the building, folks are taking in the sights, walking silently, nodding their heads and even letting a foot tap here and there.

Welcome to the future of natural history museums, where the regular soundtrack of rowdy 5-year-olds prodding displays and asking questions is being replaced by tailor-made music meant to bring to life the often staid and frozen sights. This is the future as envisioned by the museum's curators.

For the new ``Sonic Scenery'' show, 10 musicians and groups - from a Glendale classical composer to Ozomatli, the Latin hip-hop funk ensemble - were asked to pick a hall in the museum's permanent collection and create a soundscape to accompany it. Museumgoers equipped with infrared-triggered headsets hear the music play automatically as they weave through the rooms.

``We were looking for people who were innovators in their music,'' explains Ben Rogers, the museum's new media director and the show's producer. ``Normally, a musician's role is to totally captivate you with sound. Here, the job is to hang back and let the audience discover the exhibit on their own, with the music to accentuate.''

The results are as wide-ranging as the players. In the North American Mammals Hall, the San Francisco laptop duo Matmos has stuffed digitally created animal noises - and breathed life - into the stiff jaws of taxidermy creatures. Across the atrium, the L.A. pop-punk band Autolux prefers to slide into the back seat, offering up a more mellow backdrop to a room that celebrates a hodgepodge of arcane innovations, from the phonograph to a yellow iron wheat reaper.

Even the flagship dinosaur halls are bipolar. Ozomatli may have whipped up a party by the watering hole in one room, but Nels Cline's off-kilter, predatory chords only amplify the creepiness of the less-than-friendly tsintaosaurus jaws in the corner of the other hall.

``We were looking for a really diverse group of artists and a wide spectrum of music that would match up with the broad audience here,'' Rogers says.

A showcase of mostly local talent - eight of the 10 contributors are based in the L.A. area - ``Sonic Scenery'' is the latest installment in the museum's push for unconventional exhibits, following last year's popular shows ``L.A: light/motion/dreams'' and ``Conversations,'' in which six artists were allowed into the museum's storerooms to refashion historical artifacts into artworks.

For Vanda Vitali, the museum's vice president of public programs, the shows are ``experiments'' in how to attract a younger audience that wouldn't normally pencil a Friday night at a museum into its calendar. Doing that, she says, requires a bit of creativity, Los Angeles style.

``The impetus for change is never just imagination; it's the need,'' she says. ``Los Angeles is not a museum-going city. Disney and Universal Studios have understood that very well because they have created indoor and outdoor experiences. We are a center of cinema, of visual culture, and that different culture has different needs.''

Ultimately, the show's importance stretches much further than the city limits: In a field steeped in preservation, the museum is looking to brand itself internationally as an innovative tastemaker that will have a hand in reshaping the future of natural history museums.

``One of our goals is to be a leader in the field,'' Vitali says, explaining that she sees the museum's interactive series as ``helping us create a new language of exhibits.''

This means partnering with the Dutch national museum Naturalis - considered the world's most progressive natural history museum - to reproduce the ``Conversations'' show this year in the Netherlands - a huge coup for the L.A. museum. According to Vitali, this is just the start. ``All museums build their reputations by sending things out, by what they send abroad,'' Vitali says. ``We've chosen a different path. We've chosen a more original path - we are transporting our concept, not our objects.''

And so while the blue ``Sonic Scenery'' headset booth now set up in the museum's lobby will disappear come May, the concept of dinosaurs and sloths grooving to urban beats won't go extinct with it.

``(From now on,) sound will always be part of exhibits we do here because it's a very immersive experience,'' says Rogers, the new media director. ``Music is a universal language. And I think it's a very easy exhibit to enjoy.''

Emmanuelle Soichet, [phone]

emmanuelle.soichet(at)dailynews.com

SONIC SCENERY

Where: Natural History Museum, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends; through May 3.

Tickets: $9; seniors, students, kids 13-17, $6.50; kids 5-12, $2; under 5 free. Call (213) 763-DINO.

Behind the music

``Sonic Scenery'' is high-concept music, putting together a lineup of 10 groups and musicians out to create the ultimate soundtrack for the Natural History Museum's halls.

Check out David J's ``Stars and Eyes,'' which mystifyingly radiates the twinkle of the gem vault. Try and spot the one natural sound sampled by Matmos - a neighbor's dog slurping his peanut butter-covered teeth. Or listen to Jon Hassell's wacky leap-frog Swahili rhapsodizing.

While the music is solid on its own, the true beauty lies in its interplay with the stuffed beasts, fossils and relics of the halls, and in the quirky concepts drawn up by the show's motley contributors. Here are some of the musicians' takes, in their own words:

Autolux (American History Hall): ``Tears for an Inhaler''

Fresh off a tour with Nine Inch Nails, this punk-flavored L.A. pop band dropped its usual vocals and picked up a slightly discomfiting beat-and-off-chord combo to reinforce the nostalgia felt in this hall full of antique inventions. (Tip: Inhaler equals vacuum.) As guitar player Greg Edwards explains:

``There's a lot of historical implications in that room. When you walk in, there's a metaphysical and strong emotional tone. ... We noticed that these earlier inventions resembled us as humans, that by looking at their shape you could tell what they do. Unless you're an expert, you can't look at a computer program and tell its function. That time is over. That's incredible to realize, but it's disorienting and scary.''

Stephen Hartke (Gems and Minerals): ``Percolative Processes''

Glendale-based composer Stephen Hartke is using the first part of his ``music genius grant'' to write an opera. Designing his percussion-only piece for headphones - and not live performance - broke new ground for him, to say the least. But, of course, he would have it no other way.

``I come from a family of stone-cutters, and it's not hard to connect percussion with stone-cutting. I thought of the process of chipping away at rock as a sort of percussion, but so was the sound of formation. ... So we used copper bells dipped in water to bend the notes. Minerals are formed by a reaction of metal and water, so it seemed to fit naturally.''

Ozomatli: (Cenozoic Fossils): ``Tickle Me!''

Resident Latin funksters Ozomatli created a fiesta on the Rancho La Brea plain for their dynamic piece in the small dinosaur hall, replacing their usual human rapping with some slothlike vocals. Percussionist Jiro Yamaguchi on why the group went with an upbeat mood so different from the other tracks:

``When we first saw the exhibit, it brought us back to our childhoods. Then, we went back with our kids later to take pictures, and we noticed their reaction. They got really excited. So we figured we wanted to be more playful - you laugh with tickling, it sounds kind of silly for a museum, but it works.''

Languis: (Dinosaurs West): ``Mending Spear, Part II''

The four-man group out of Silver Lake makes what member Alejandro Cohen calls ``visual music.'' Combining synthesizers from the 1970s, analog tape wheels, some live percussion and a recorder, for good measure, the group recorded its piece in the Dinosaur West hall, taking advantage of the echo-vamping acoustics.

``We were interested in recreating the excitement of exploration, to make it in a way that you felt you could move some bushes to the side and you'd find dinosaurs - re-creating that sense of suspense. We want you first to be intrigued, wanting to see more, then toward the end of the song, to feel like you've seen (the show) under a new light.''

The entire ``Sonic Scenery'' album is available for download through iTunes for $9.99, or for 99 cents a track. Otherwise, the museum's infrared-operated headset tour will set you back $3.

- E.S.

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- color) The Sun Ra Arkestra's music jazzes up the art of ancient Latin America.

(2 -- color) Jon Hassell's trumpet soundtrack transports the African mammal room's visitors to the beasts' habitat.

(3 -- color) Autolux

(4 -- color) Stephen Hartke

(5 -- color) Ozomatli

(6 -- color) Languis

Box:

BEHIND the music (see text)