26 AV FOCUS Audio
A new generation of museums and exhibition spaces is placing audio – particularly immersive audio – at the heart of its visitor experience. The results are hugely captivating
uman beings are fundamentally visually driven, owing largely to the path of evolution and the need to be on the lookout for food,
just as true in a museum or gallery as it is in a Broadway musical or arena concert.” Second, there is a growing recognition that immersive audio can play a part in “attracting visitors and achieving higher footfalls”, says Ben Blackler, co-founder of PastPorte, a company that specialises in immersive storytelling for museums and heritage attractions. It can provide an element to the experience that “people will talk about to their friends and will therefore bring more people through the door”. Increasing the numbers of loudspeakers (often more than 30) in conjunction with ever-higher-resolution visuals ensures that exhibits resonate more strongly with younger audiences, namely those engaged in the all-encompassing worlds of VR and gaming. As Blackler notes, the boundaries between those pastimes and the kind of exhibits that can be delivered in the museum space are “increasingly thin”. INCREASING INTEGRATION Zero in on the specifics of audio delivery in most areas of professional AV and it won’t be too long before you encounter someone bemoaning the disparity between the levels of investment in the ‘A’ and ‘V’ in AV. But as the awareness of immersive audio’s capacity to transform an exhibit has
predators and mates. It is no surprise that this visual emphasis is writ large in museums and exhibition spaces the world over – to the extent that the capability of audio to evoke places, people and experiences has sometimes been overlooked. But recently, several distinct trends have combined to effect a significant change in the importance placed on audio in the museum sector. First, the advent of a greater range of immersive audio systems has made an impact on curators and producers, encouraging them to realise that an experience in sound can be every bit as captivating as a visual one. “The idea of creating an ‘immersive’ exhibit is far from new – older technologies such as channel-based surround sound have been deployed in these kinds of projects for many years,” says Bjorn Van Munster, founder of leading object-based 3D sound company Astro Spatial Audio. “The difference now is that the creators of these experiences have so many more possibilities open to them as a result of object-based audio. We often say that the only limit is your imagination – and that’s
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