Sonic stories: How audio is transforming museums and heritage

Paul Mac explores both the state of the art, and the state of the tech for museum and exhibition sound design. Apparently, things have never been better.
 

Museums, commercial and corporate exhibition spaces, pop-up galleries, and so on, all have one thing in common: the visitor ‘experience’. The value of these spaces is rarely counted simply by the objects within, or the information they hold… Information is so easy to come by these days anyway. No, the value is in the experience, the immersion - the extent to which visitors can be in that time, or that place, or that moment.

We all know that sound has an important part to play in conjuring up that experience, in creating that value for visitors. Thankfully, sound itself, in these spaces, has never been more valuable.

Karen Monid is a sound artist and projection specialist working with The Projection Studio - a UK-based specialist in projection mapping. She says that museums and similar spaces can sometimes suffer from a kind of visitor alienation brought on by a lack of context or immersion. “If you go to a gallery or a museum and they have a stained glass window inside a glass case or a statue in the corner, it’s just something that was once in a church,” she explains. “It’s there, but everything else that was once a part of it is missing - a whole world of connections.

“If you walk into a church and see that same statue, you experience the church. People change their behaviour automatically when they walk into a space like that, and it forces them to consider that statue in a completely different way. It's that kind of shift that we try to recreate. We want to put people in that space. They then start to be receptive; you can start to introduce new information and it makes more sense.

Phil Marlowe is managing director of the Middle East office of AVI-SPL, a global AV integrator. “Sound plays a powerful role in shaping atmosphere and triggering emotional responses,” he says. “It can determine how effectively exhibits come to life, and how connected visitors feel.”

The technology facilitator

Modern sound experiences inside museums and other exhibit spaces can generally be split into ambient or ‘scene’ sound, and sound objects - or more directional sounds - such as animal noises in a rainforest exhibit, or even directional commentary or narration. This is a gross simplification when we consider how sophisticated museum soundscapes can be, but these needs, and the evolutions of these needs, illustrate the value that relatively recent developments bring.

That is, the latest sound mapping tools and systems, ultra directional speakers and arrays, fully networked installations, and sophisticated triggers and control systems can come together in ways that give visitors an active and impactful role in the exhibit - and offer an unprecedented creative palette to the sound designer and the client.

The story starts with infrastructure - the availability and reliability of networked transport and PoE (Power over Ethernet): “When we first started doing these systems we were having to run individual pairs of speaker cable for every single speaker with dedicated amps,” says Marlowe.  “Manufacturers were not building high-channel count amps with low power, and a complex project would always be expensive and difficult.

“Now with small class D amplifiers, PoE, and Dante, we can run one cat6 to small active speakers. All you need back at the rack is a network switch. We’re able to do so much more with the same price point.

“We’re working on a big project in the UAE at the moment where every single speaker in the facility is network-based, with full spatial-based audio from d&b Soundscape and heavy channel counts in every space with Pixera playback. D&b Soundscape is becoming a huge success for us, especially in things like corporate experience spaces, and welcome centres.”

Tricky position

Soundscape is one of a number of sound mapping systems that has advanced tools for real time mixing and positioning or channels and stems in a three-dimensional space. These kinds of products are pushing the state of the art forward at an impressive space, along with the development of ultra directional speaker systems and arrays that allow installers and sound designers to target specific areas with remarkable accuracy.

“Not so long ago we would start with a floor plan and plan the locations of many speakers in the ceiling to target visitors below,” says Marlowe. “We would design audio around that, maybe with track 1 to one speaker, track 2 to another, and so on. Now we can design a single distributed spatial system.

“Of course, we could do that several years ago too, but that involved an audio designer and content creator inside the space with a full Pro Tools rig, live mixing. Once that mix was complete, you had no flexibility to change it. Now we can dynamically move stuff around live. That, in turn, has made it far easier for clients to modify their own spaces. Previously it could have been tens of thousands of dollars to bring in that audio designer again to make changes.”

Interaction or triggers in these spaces can be something as simple as an RFID (Radio Frequency ID) that activates an audio or video response. It could be the number, or density, of people in the room - quantified with camera tracking systems. The more people there are, the more alive the space might become, for example. “Then we have some really advanced facilities that are using RTLS (Real Time Location Tracking Systems),” says Phil. “They actively track individual guests and where they are in the facility -  triggering different things based on their profile.

“If you look at what Holoplot is doing as an example of pinpoint accurate audio, we could be tracking and speaking to a group of people in their native language, whilst speaking to people a couple of meters away in a different language. That has changed things quite a bit.

AVI-SPL developed an audio track to specifically drive Buttkickers that added to an immersive lift experience at the Museum of the Future in Dubai. 

Haptic control from audio is another exciting aspect. As reported in Inavate in January 2023, AVI-SPL used the Buttkicker product at the Museum of the Future. For Marlowe, the most important aspect of this was that they developed an audio track specifically to drive the ButtKickers rather than simply using them to underline the main audio. “The content creator on that project was very special and understood exactly what we could achieve with a little bit more effort,” he says.

Visitors’ guide

Anders Jørgensen is project manager and senior theatre consultant at Danish integrator Stouenborg. Commonly, Stouenborg works with special and atmospheric sound alongside pinpoint source sounds using large scale playback systems like Pyramix, or with sound mapping systems such as Meyer Sound’s Galileo Galaxy platform and Spacemap Go.

However, he says that a recent project in Denmark showing the history and journeys of refugees coming into the country benefited from a direct audio guide, where “the story really comes to life.” However, he says one of the downsides of personal audio guides is that they are not shared experiences. “If you're a family visiting with your kids, you don't hear the same thing,” he explains. “And you don't necessarily get the opportunity to talk about it.”
Stouenborg deployed an audio guide at the Flight Refugee Museum in Denmark to powerful effect. However, the trade off with this approach is the reduction in shared experience.

He says that the solution could be in ever-higher precision and scalability of directional audio systems. “What I’m hoping for is centimetre precision for a truly tailored solution for larger numbers. You can do it on a small scale - for 20 people, but going to 200 people would make a big difference. Combine that with XR and AR experiences and you have a powerful tool.”

Marlowe’s view is that, at the pace of current development, the future might be weeks away: “The evolution of that tech is happening so fast now. Even within some of those platforms we spoke about, every month there's a new feature set that's being rolled out that takes what we thought was already an amazing platform to a whole other level.”

Creation and content

Fundamentally, sound design for exhibition spaces and museums is a creative endeavour - from first concept, to tech spec, to sound design, to deployment. Monid at The Projection Studio has much to say on creative approaches to exhibits and experiences in public spaces. First, she makes the point that sound finds its main value in the 360-degree nature of the hearing sense. “With your eyes you have a single view,” she explains. “You do have peripheral vision of course, but you can't see behind you; and you can only touch what you can get your hands on. Possibly the only two senses that are genuinely immersive are hearing and scent.

“I like to put visitors in the position of the person who would have made the artwork, or written the manuscript. The moment I can put a human being into that mindset, things start to make more sense - without having to explain.”

One project Monid is very proud of was called Codex - a touring promotion for a new exhibition based around the Lindisfarne gospels and located in Newcastle, UK. “Durham University wanted us to do some outreach based on the fact that the exhibition was there, in the area where the Scribe created the gospels, during a golden age for Northumbria.

“We created the exhibit by projecting onto calfskin - an actual piece of vellum stretched over a herse [the frame]. We toured this around as an object and that became a portal to the exhibition in Newcastle. We created a ten-minute piece of content that took you through the wider history, including the travel they did to the Mediterranean. As part of that, we worked with the original languages - Old English and Latin. We wanted people to experience how Rome would have actually sounded. I also did location recordings on Lindisfarne for the piece - the ocean and the environment.”

This is the kind of effort and detail that Monid believes is necessary to push an experience to new heights and bring visitors into the moment you’re trying to represent. It’s worth noting that both Monid and Ross Ashton (creative director of The Projection Studio) put so much effort into this that they are now both honorary fellows of Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

For keep’s sake

While creative and technical mostly do go hand-in-hand, often there has to be either compromise, or a solution that works within constraints. Monid points out that while large spatial audio systems have an ever-increasing place in these spaces, sometimes it’s just not possible to deploy them - often because the very spaces she works in are precious parts of the exhibit themselves.

Projection Studio delivered an audio installation to immerse visitors in the history of Clifford’s Tower, a medieval castle keep in York, UK

Another Projection Studio Project saw them working in Cliffords Tower, a medieval castle keep in York, UK. “In a museum, you can put in directional speakers, you can put in treatments.” says Monid. “However, if all of those kinds of technical options are no longer available, you have to get creative. We had to construct something that would work in that space - probably the toughest environment to work in.”

“It was quite complex and we divided the project into two systems and had to work together. For one, we had four concrete benches that each had characters talking about their lives from that position. We also divided the space into quadrants and put in speakers to cover each quadrant. Three different scenes, all related to each other, were synchronised and all designed to start playback at different times - the benches as well. So we didn’t overload the space diagonally opposite quadrants play together and swap over together.”

Client side

In the end, it’s the clients that agree the tone and the expectations of any project, but they can only realistically do that - or even start to explore the value of sound design in their spaces, if they know what is possible, or simply even the minimal extent that sound can enhance an experience.

Thankfully it seems that clients are becoming more sound-savvy. Everybody who contributed to this article cited examples where the kinds of things installers and sound designers want to suggest or cite as part of a proposal have been experienced in either public media or in rapidly building numbers of exhibits. The clients now know what could be.

“The ones that are interested in what I do as a sound designer are always more aware of the possibilities,” says Jørgensen. “Though certainly looking back, say ten years, there is a much bigger focus on sound now and we’re seeing a big shift - lots of new and more interesting exhibitions because people are better educated and understand the power of sound.”

More museums are investing in future proofing too. Sound mapping technologies and networked audio infrastructures mean that spaces can be more easily adapted as needs change. “Some customers want it included everywhere because they want to futureproof themselves going forward,” says Marlowe. “This is especially true for partner-based spaces for example, or rotating exhibit spaces.”

According to Marlowe, ongoing support for clients and their exhibit spaces sets a good provider apart: “We pride ourselves on staying involved with our customers for typically, several years post opening. Some of our customers are a lot more self-sufficient than others. Some have very large teams behind them that are running and maintaining the exhibits, and adapting; some of them rely on us to provide those services, whether it's full time onsite with our onsite managed service or on an ad hoc basis with a pool of hours, like a consultant.”

Sound off

The most encouraging aspect of this whole exploration has been that sound has never been more valuable in visitor centres, museums, and commercial exhibition spaces. Some incredible headway in spatial and object-based systems, alongside ultra directional technologies and practical networked standards over relatively recent times has widened the possibility space for everybody.

The operators and curators of these spaces are also more aware than ever before, and are rightly demanding ever more ambitious, immersive, realistic, and impactful experiences. There has never been greater creativity or creative demand in this market. These really are exciting times.

 

Source: www.inavateonthenet.net