Soundscape of an Archaeological Site Recreated with Audio Augmented Reality

Abstract

This article investigates the use of an audio augmented reality (AAR) system to recreate the soundscape of a medieval archaeological site. The aim of our work was to explore whether it is possible to enhance a tourist's archaeological experience, which is often derived from only scarce remains. We developed a smartphone-based AAR system, which uses location and orientation sensors to synthesize the soundscape of a site and plays it to the user via headphones. We recreated the ancient soundscape of a medieval archaeological site in Croatia and tested it in situ on two groups of participants using the soundwalk method. One test group performed the soundwalk while listening to the recreated soundscape using the AAR system, while the second control group did not use the AAR equipment. We measured the experiences of the participants using two methods: the standard soundwalk questionnaire and affective computing equipment for detecting the emotional state of participants. The results of both test methods show that participants who were listening to the ancient soundscape using our AAR system experienced higher arousal than those visiting the site without AAR.

Automatic Museum Audio Guide

“…This approach tries to reduce the interaction between the system and tourists sharing the tour context between the hand-held and wearable devices, guiding the users by compensating the individual weaknesses of the devices. In line with this idea, [28] proposed an audio augmented reality system to recreate the soundscape of a medieval archaeological site to enhance the user experience by improving the immersion of the participants and [29] provided augmented reality (AR) and additional information about buildings affected by earthquakes in a certain city. [30] also employed AR combined with maps to enrich the user's experience.…”

Nature soundscapes

“…Soundscapes are an intertwined mixture of their context, the physical environment, the sound sources, and the listener's perception, knowledge and experiences [42]. The perception of a soundscape is formed by the listener, their expectations, emotions, and cognitive associations triggered during exposure to the sounds heard in a location [6].…”

“…Sikora et al [42] support the adoption of AAR as a tool to change the naturally occurring mixture of biophony, anthrophony, and geophony in an environment. Their research documents an AAR experience situated in an outdoor space, specifically that of an archaeological site.…”

“…Many of the related AAR approaches have so far been understandably concerned with application in settings related to tourism, culture and heritage [7,14,42,47]. These settings are ones where the AAR system provides additional information about objects in, at some point in time, the environment surrounding the user.…”

“…Soundwalks have been shown to be a valid subjective evaluation mechanism for soundscapes, since they are able to provide a fuller representation of a user experiences and that the use of questionnaires with Likert-style questions are an effective way to capture such data [7,40,42]. A questionnaire was devised for completion by participants at the end of their AAR experience, consisting of a total of sixteen questions.…”