The trouble with the greatest paintings in our grandest museums is that they eventually turn into tea towels.

Or mousemats, umbrellas, wrapping paper, Google images and clichés. And at that point, you can never look them in the eye again.

Multiple reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or Constable’s The Cornfield, or Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ induce visual bulimia, and much as you would like to study these classics closely, your instinct in the gallery is to walk on by and leave the top 20 to tourists and swarming schoolchildren. Each picture gets an average of 30 seconds from the viewer: been there, seen that, bought the laminated Sunflowers shopping bag.

So how do museums give the jaded art-lover a good slap in the face and get the tourists to slow down? Set the art to music, of course. Now this idea is not as bad as I suspected as I headed into the National Gallery in London this week to preview its new Sounds of the Gallery tour. Composers and ageing rockers had been let loose in the museum, each making a three-minute soundscape, “a sound art piece, created in direct response to a painting”.

“Am I alone in finding the word ‘soundscape’ mildly terrifying?” asked one critic, and I agree. Surely a gallery should remain one of the last pockets of silence in this soundscaped world of Asda Radio, shuffling iPods, hospital elevator music and shameless talk on mobiles?

More worrying still: would it be singalonga Seurat? Rap with Raphael? Well, no. In a corner of the gallery, far from the madding crowd, I plugged in my headphones before a small, dark oil:

David Teniers the Younger’s The Rich Man being led To Hell. It’s a terrifying, grotesque painting of a well-dressed old gent being dragged through a cave by a demon, and Simon Bowden has composed three minutes of mad brilliance to bring it alive.

Bats squeak and spit in the deep cave, a snake hisses across the ground, and panicked breathing is followed by the intonation of the parable of the rich man and the poor man from Luke. The rich gentleman is clothed in linen and eating sumptuously; the beggar at his gate is covered in suppurating sores. You get the picture. Actually, suddenly you do get the picture and enter into a simulacrum of the artist’s imagination: the 17th-century mind, the satanic monsters he conjured by night, the fear. An almost Dalek-like electronic voice intones: “They will repent!” Then there’s the final note of the door-to-Hell closing for ever.

Immediately I wanted to play the recording at full volume to those gallery-goers giving the picture a quick, dismissive glance. Three minutes of sound had opened up a completely different vision.

There are 11 soundtracked paintings. Jem Finer of the Pogues interprets Monet’s The Thames below Westminster with the creaks of the wooden pier, the distant foghorns and a rippling, dappling score — all unexpectedly polite. Chris Watson, who works as a sound recordist with David Attenborough, takes Constable’s The Cornfield at face value, with all the correct birds tweeting, a church bell tolling in the distance, sheep passing and a woodpecker hammering a tree. It’s very Radio 4 natural history unit.

Nick Gratwick tries to explain synesthesia, the crossover of two senses, through Paul Gauguin’s vase of tropical flowers. For Gratwick, red was musically rounded, light blue tinkly, dark blue double-barrelled, and green strong and clear.

David Toop — who describes himself as a “curator of sound”, member of the Flying Lizards, author and experimental musician — picked a peculiar object for his composition: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s A Peepshow, a three-dimensional Dutch interior in a box, a sort of painted doll’s house in the style of Vermeer. “It’s a bit like a TV set in a frozen moment — called ‘Peep Show’, like the TV series — and you are the voyeur,” Toop says. “When I looked closer, I saw a narrative there, I took elements of it and gave them a sonic equivalent.” It sounds like a film soundtrack: someone snoring in bed, a dog panting, a broom sweeping, the street noises outside. Now, there’s someone mysterious at the front door. It slams.

“It’s full of symbols, one of six ‘Peep Shows’ he did. Maybe the narrative is that the woman painted inside is a prostitute and the man at the door is a client. Even the tiny paintings on the walls emphasise the struggle of virtue versus licentiousness.”

Toop says that in Dutch 17th-century painting, sound is very important. “It is implicit. There are acts of listening and noise, and the representation of music.” Vermeer’s work often contains musical instruments. “These paintings had a very sophisticated use of perspective and space, and sound is a strong characteristic of space.”

He also considered soundscaping Seurat’s bathers, that idyllic riverside scene. “You’ve seen it so many times you think you know it, but there is so much else going on: the factories opposite pouring out smoke, a boy shouting across river, a dog pricking up his ears.” Talking of ears, at least none of the composers tackled Van Gogh’s Sunflowers — possibly because the artist himself had a low opinion of soundscapes, given his predilection for aural amputation.

The soundscape concept may also work both ways; perhaps we should record viewers’ reactions, too. As Edmond de Goncourt observed two centuries ago: “A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”

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