Gallery Audio
Overview
Our interpretive teams are all experienced with how sound has a profound impact on experience. Play one musical score versus another in a movie, and the experience can be incredibly different. We wanted recreate that kind of experience and switch with our visitors in the galleries while they were viewing art.
During the early development and testing of the idea, visitors revealed that when they encountered audio in galleries, they typically expected a didactic experience with audio being tightly tied to specific works of art and revealing deeper information. This was the opposite of what we were looking for and realized that the installation itself needed to immediately convey a different expectation — this was about music, not interpretation.
After playing with different devices and some custom interfaces, we finally settled on integrating iPods with comfortable seating in our Western and African Galleries. We needed to modify the iPod firmware to display some custom graphics and then also made extensive use of the alternate Notes Mode available. The obvious advantages here were that iPods have a high enough market saturation that many visitors are already familiar with the interface and the form factor creates an expectation for music.
In the Western Gallery, a variety of genres including showtunes, traditional western music, and modern rock about the west all create different soundscapes to experience the gallery. Nearby journals have recorded visitor reactions which have been universally positive with numerous suggestions for additional being made.
In the African Gallery, rather than focusing on different genres, music from a wide variety African countries is featured. Some of it traditional, some of it modern pop, but all of it from the same origins as the artworks in the gallery.
