Materialising contexts: virtual soundscapes for real-world exploration

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study based on a group of participants' interactions with an experimental sound installation at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, UK. The installation used audio augmented reality to attach virtual sound sources to a vintage radio receiver from the museum's collection, with a view to understanding the potentials of this technology for promoting exploration and engagement within museums and galleries. We employ a practice-based design ethnography, including a thematic analysis of our participants' interactions with spatialised interactive audio, and present an identified sequence of interactional phases. We discuss how audio augmented artefacts can communicate and engage visitors beyond their traditional confines of line-of-sight, and how visitors can be drawn to engage further, beyond the realm of their original encounter. Finally, we provide evidence of how contextualised and embodied interactions, along with authentic audio reproduction, evoked personal memories associated with our museum artefact, and how this can promote interest in the acquisition of declarative knowledge. Additionally, through the adoption of a functional and theoretical aura-based model, we present ways in which this could be achieved, and, overall, we demonstrate a material object's potential role as an interface for engaging users with, and contextualising, immaterial digital audio archival content.

Sonic enhancement of virtual exhibits

“…In such contexts, sound has the potential to create a more individualized experience for spectators by adapting to their "goals, preferences, knowledge, and interests," as Andreas Zimmermann and Andreas Lorenz have persuasively shown [5]. It also may provide a catalyst both for acquiring knowledge and for evoking "personal memories associated with a museum artifact," as Laurence Cliffe et al recently revealed [6]. That all said, relatively little existing scholarship has addressed the ways in which sound design shapes the experiences of audiences within VEs.…”

Neuro-curation

“…Sound has long been known to have the potential to give museum exhibits additional emotional power [1] as well as allowing visitors to generate different interpretative perspectives on an exhibit [2], [3]. Consequently, museums have begun to explore sound in order to produce more entertaining exhibitions [4]. The LISTEN system [5] is an audio augmented reality (AAR) system for museum exhibits which tracks visitor behaviour in order to adjust delivery of the audio content of the exhibition.…”