How to create museum audio content
Audio can be a powerful medium when sharing a story or engaging visitors at your museum. Perhaps you’d like to leverage this medium better on your own site but aren’t sure where to begin? Well, read on!
What to Consider
At Blackbox-av we produce a diverse range of off the shelf audio devices such as the outdoor audio point U-Turn Round or the ever versatile Audio Frame, all easily programmed and adaptable for multiple applications and locations. If you need to share audio, we have the hardware solution to do it, check out the full range here.
So we have the hardware sorted but you aren’t sure where to start when it comes to creating the audio content… this guide will talk you through the process of developing and then creating suitable audio for your site.
1) What's the story?
Step 1 is always figuring out exactly the message you’re trying to share. Do you want to give visitors a better insight into a specific event, are you trying to create a certain atmosphere for people on site? You must first figure out exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with your audio.
Oral histories are a great way to connect with visitors and provide historic insight. Atmospheric audio is another great way to create a certain ‘mood’ on site such as the sound of archers defending a castle wall. The possibilities are endless it all depends on what story you’re trying to share.
2) Who's the audience?
Consider the typical visitor to your site, what do you think would improve their experience, what kind of content do you think they would be interested in.
Perhaps you run an outdoor attraction with plenty of wildlife, in this case an outdoor audio point with sample sounds of the wildlife a visitor might encounter could be of benefit?
Consider the age of your audience or general level of knowledge, language and terminology are things to consider. For example, children are less likely to understand complex words and the general public are not likely to understand industry specific terminology and phrases.
3) How long have you got?
Time is something most people don’t give much consideration but the fact is we live in a fast moving world. You may also have a busy site and shouldn’t want people to dwell too long at any given point.
Most people won’t spend more than 5 minutes listening to a single piece of audio interpretation. It’s always better to have a 30 second clip that’s interesting and informative than a 5 minute long dialogue that nobody will get to the end of.
Consider the length of your audio when producing it. Obviously some forms such as atmospheric audio don’t necessarily need a time limit, but something like an oral history should.
4) What's the outcome?
This is at the core of creating audio content for your museum, what do you want people to take away from the content? You may want them to learn about a specific historical event, if you produce something that buries this fact in the middle of the clip then you’ll probably fail at informing the majority of listeners.
Whether it be to inform, educate or possibly advertise, make sure you understand the desired outcome thoroughly so that it can be interpreted correctly in your audio content.
5) How will it be heard?
How do you intend to share the audio with visitors? Through headphones, mono or stereo hardware, speakers, an outdoor product, audio guide? This all matters to the final product, outdoor locations for example may require louder audio to be heard.
Audio through headphones may be stereo, which means you can leverage 2 channel audio to create a more engaging experience – for example a conversation between two people with audio coming through R or L channel depending on who’s speaking.
An audio guide is activated when visitors enter a certain spot, consider how long they may stay there when deciding how long an audio piece to produce.
and so on!
6) How will it be triggered?
Something most people overlook when creating museum audio is the manner in which it will be triggered. Will it be endlessly looping audio over a speaker system? Does the playback device allow for a seamless loop, if not you will want to fade out/in at the end/start to avoid a jarring transition.
Is it content that will be activated automatically when a PIR is triggered, or a headphone is lifted from it’s hanger? In which case you’ll want a short delay at the start to make sure the user gets the headphones on before it begins, or into optimum position if a PIR etc.
If one of our Solar Audio Posts is to be used for example we always recommend shorter clips to save on the battery usage.
7) D.I.Y
So you’ve considered all the above and now’s the time to create your audio. If you’re on a budget then this is a good time to use your creativity and Do It Yourself (if possible).
Good quality recording equipment can be found online for a fair price these days or you could even use your phone. Editing clips together can be done with free software such as ‘Audacity’ and if you search online you can even find repositories of free sound effects.
Recruit some friends to lend their voice to your project, watch some tutorials on YouTube and don’t be afraid to mess things up the first time (or two), that’s how you learn!
8) Leave it to the experts
Or if you don’t have the time or technical expertise you can always leave it to the experts. We offer a content creation service where we’ll work closely with you to take your vision from concept to reality, helping at every stage from initial curation of your proposed scripts, to suggestions of sound effects that could be used and then finally the actual recording and production.
You can see an example of our AV work using the button below. Please get in touch if you have anything at all you’d like to discuss, we’d love to work on your next project.
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