As the use of media and interactivity increases in museum exhibitions, so too does noise generation. Designers spend months considering the relationships between objects and images, the balance of color and light, the segues between one content area and the next, yet one of the most overlooked aspects of exhibitions today is the balance of sound-producing exhibit elements. Video narrations bleed into one another, each with their own soundtrack. Sound from interactivity (both electronic and mechanical), as well as the environmental sound poured into a space for atmosphere, all collide, producing a cacophony that undermines the clarity of content and the best intentions of many museum exhibitions.

Soundscape Design

The term soundscape describes the naturally occurring culmination of sounds within any environment. Like a naturally existing landscape the soundscape is pre-existing and, in most cases, random. In the same way a landscape can be “landscaped” to serve a particular order, aesthetic or function, the soundscape can be “soundscaped”.

Proper soundscaping involves a variety of strategies that can help balance and give intension to the sonic elements of the exhibition. This is not simply a matter of developing a score or applying acoustical treatments to the space. A thoughtful soundscape (as it applies to exhibition design) will account for what could otherwise be a potentially disruptive tangle of sound and weave it into something harmonious and complimentary.

The process of soundscaping for exhibitions starts by considering all of the sounds that will be produced and their proximity to each other. Balancing these elements is critical if we are to avoid the thundering noise reminiscent of the home entertainment department at Best Buy.

Architectural surface treatments, often used in remedying noise issues in exhibitions, may help to reduce sound reflecting all over the space, but do nothing to resolve the collision of voices and jumble of soundtracks, sound effects and musical scores. The best acoustically designed space in the world can only make the sound of clamor, clamor more clearly.

In 2010 the Field Museum was producing Mammoths and Mastodon’s: Titans of the Ice Age. The exhibition was being designed to travel. The decision was made NOT to require the construction of dividing walls for the exhibition in order to reduce the strain on the overall budget and remain attractive to other museums. A traveling exhibition was expensive enough without the additional cost of building partitions for each content area. But, in considering “sound spill” problems experienced in previous traveling exhibitions they knew a lack of barriers in Mammoths and Mastodons could easily lead to a sonic mess. Because of my background in both sound art installation and exhibition design, I was hired to design a soundscape that would remedy the impending cacophony.

Below is an example of the conditions, responses and interactions made in soundscaping the Mammoths and Mastodons exhibition.

1. Design Problem:

Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age was a traveling exhibit designed to fit a 7000 – 8000 sq. ft. museum hall.  The exhibition’s 10 audio visual elements and at least two mechanical interactives were likely to cause a cacophony and threaten the clarity of content because of their overlooked acoustical overlaps.

Except for the existing architecture that divides the exhibit into two spaces there were no barriers to contain each content area or prevent sound from spilling through multiple areas. Because the exhibition would travel to other museums, the relationships between its various acoustical elements would change in each new venue.              

2. Goals:

For the exhibition, Mammoths and Mastodons there were three goals. The first was to ensure the audibility and integrity of the overall acoustical environment. Examples of this included resolving voice-overlap from different narrated videos in close proximity and reducing sound-spill from adjacent content areas.  The second goal was to apply an acoustical identity to each of the individual content areas by establishing a setting or tone. The third goal was to unify the results of the first two goals, providing structure and character to the exhibition’s acoustical experience.

3. Solutions:

There were roughly 5 main content areas with media with audio. Each area contained multiple tracks, ie, voiceover, background/environmental sound, musical score. Part of the solution was re-thinking how these tracks were arranged in each area, what type of speaker would be used and how the speaker would be focused.

The mechanical interactives in this exhibition were also reviewed for their “noise potential”. Efforts were made to reduce and/or integrate these sounds. Sound baffling techniques were explored as a means of reducing sound spill from one section to another, but this was abandoned primarily due to cost and difficulty of installation for each museum the exhibition traveled to. An atmospheric score was produced, partly to lend mood and an acoustical identity to each content area and partly to “mask” tones filtering in from other sections. The dissonance that could have occurred from the atmospheric sound coming from each of the 5 areas was averted by treating each space like a single track of a multi-track composition. No matter where one stood, or how the sections of the exhibition were arranged, the tracks were always in sync with each other. If you played them all in one area they would sound like a single piece of music. Such an element could easily have become too apparent. The goal was to keep the atmospheric composition in the background, augmenting the exhibition experience without becoming a consciously overt part of it. Careful attention was paid to minimizing the composition’s complexity for each content area.

4. Participation:

Below are brief descriptions of my interactions with museum staff members and independent contractors in creating the soundscape. 

Museum’s Media Producer:

• I worked with the Field Museum’s Media Producer to gather and discuss the audio files from the exhibition’s AV content.

• A set of instructions were created to specify the channel distribution of each audio element as it impacted the production of the media pieces for the exhibition. These instructions were used by the Field Museum’s Media Producer to clearly communicate these adjustments to other contracted media producers. An example of such adjustments might include making sure that all background music be removed from "talking head" videos, helping to ensure against an unnecessary soup of clashing music. (Any musical ambiance would be provided as a single work for the entire exhibition, unifying the "talking heads" under one score), or that the frequency range of the voices in each of these videos was tightened to exclude upper and lower frequencies thus minimizing greater sound spill.

AV Manager:

• I worked with the Field Museum’s AV manager to define speaker locations, mounting strategies and playback systems. We also conducted experiments testing the focus of different speaker types, matching speakers with their function.

 • A document (block diagram) was produced to show how sound for the exhibition would need to be broken out into specific channels. Another set of documents (speaker layout plan and elevation(s)) were created to show how and where the speakers would be situated.

Exhibition Designer:

• I met with the Field’s exhibition designer to discuss aesthetic and material choices for speaker mounting options, sound baffling strategies and intended mood.

Exhibition Developer:

• I met with the Field’s Exhibition Developer to gain an understanding of general content goals and intended impressions for each space. The exhibition content was laid out, more or less chronologically and so this would influence the conditions of any environmental sounds used but also the mood and texture of the musical composition for each area.

Composers:

• A song composed by Andrew Bird entitled "You Woke Me Up" was chosen by the Field Museum as something the visitor would hear at the end of the exhibition. Drawing on elements Bird's composition I worked with another composer, to develop a spatially considered ambient atmospheres for each section.

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