Tips on audio tour

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Kim KenneyBellaOnline's Museums Editor

Museum Audio Tour Tips

Audio tours are an excellent way to convey information to your visitors who learn

best through the spoken word. You can also use them to provide more in-depth

information about a subject.

Here are some tips for creating an effective audio tour at your museum:

Keep It Short!

No one wants to listen to a curator drone on and on about a historic event or piece of

artwork. Think of audio tours as museum labels – shorter is better, and more effective.

Choose only the most important information to share with your visitors. Try to keep

each segment under one minute.

Break Up Information

Rather than creating one long audio program on a broad subject, break it up into

sections so visitors can choose what part they want to learn about. For example,

instead of recording one segment on life as a pioneer, record an overview with

additional options for visitors to learn more about open hearth cooking, building a

cabin in the wilderness, the journey west, and self-sufficiency on the Frontier.

Create Spotlights

Create a series of audio tours that feature relevant oral history recordings, vintage

music, or news broadcasts of the period. Or feature behind-the-scenes information

about some aspect of the exhibit, such as the provenance of a specific artifact or

commentary on its restoration and conservation. Record the Curator explaining how

an item was donated to the museum or how certain pieces were selected for an

exhibition. Consider a special set of recordings aimed specifically at kids.

Tone of Voice

Most audio tours will feature scripts read by the museum staff. Be careful about your

tone. Make it lively and exciting! Don’t simply read from your script – make it sound

like a performance. Study nightly news anchors for some pointers on intonation and

tone.

Vary the Voices

Ask a variety of people to record your audio tours for you. No one wants to listen to

the same voice speak in gallery after gallery. If you plan to read excerpts from a diary

or oral history transcript, use one voice to represent each person.

Sound Effects

Some of the best audio tours are those that incorporate real sounds in the background.

When visiting one of Newport, Rhode Island’s grand mansions, the audio tour

featured the clanking of forks and glasses in the dining room and quartet music in the

ballroom. It really brought the space to life for visitors, who could imagine the rooms

bustling with activity during the Gilded Age.

Podcasting Museum Audio Tours Kim KenneyBellaOnline's Museums Editor

With MP3 players all the rage these days, The Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas

decided to take advantage of a growing trend – and reach a new audience to boot.

According to James Yasko, a curatorial assistant at The Grace Museum who

developed the new “musecasts,” one in four 12-17 year olds and one in five 18-34

year olds own some sort of MP3 player. “Attracting a newer, younger crowd not

familiar with museums outside their annual trip to the museum is definitely a goal and

a dream,” says Yasko.

By the end of the month, Yasko said there will be a total of 10 different audio tours,

covering three exhibitions, available for downloading on the museum’s website.

The museum plans to develop more podcasts in the future.

“We plan to produce at least one podcast for each exhibit we display,” says Yasko.

“With four galleries, there will at any given time be at least four podcasts to

download. We have an exhibit opening in August on photographs from the country of

Bhutan. We will have interviews with the Bhutan Desk Officer from the State

Department, two faculty members from Canadian universities who live in Bhutan, and

we're in the process of confirming an interview with the Bhutanese Ambassador to the

United Nations.”

The length of each podcast varies. The museum’s first podcast is an interview with

San Antonio photographer Michael Nye that lasts about 25 minutes. The museum also

offers interviews with board members who participated in an exhibit called Board

Picks, in which each member chose a piece of art from the museum’s permanent

collection. Each interview lasts between 90 seconds and 4 minutes.

Only a handful of other institutions are currently utilizing this technology, including

the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville and the Museum of Modern Art in New

York City. The Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas and the new art museum

at Duke University have both contacted Yasko to discuss adding podcasting to their

programming.

Podcasts can potentially add a whole new dimension to the visitor’s experience.

“It opens up a whole new world of programming,” says Yasko. “Speakers and experts

that would be impossible to get to come to The Grace (for instance, the Ambassador)

are now available in our visitors' ears.”

This type of programming may also help visitors retain information they learn in an

exhibition. According to Marjorie Schwarzer’s article “Art & Gadgetry” in the

July/August 2001 issue of Museum News, “Only six percent of visitors retain

information about an object from labels, but more than 30% remember what they hear

about an object.”

So far the response has been very positive, but difficult to trace. “We're working with

our service provider to be able to track how many people actually download the

podcasts,” says Yasko, “but at the outset the response has been overwhelmingly

positive.”

Yasko has high hopes for the new podcasts, a project which hardly costs the museum

anything. He has all the equipment on his home computer to produce the audio tours.

The only expense is server space. The visitors themselves already own the equipment.

“Any new technology is flippantly referred to as ‘world-changing’ and ‘barrier-

shattering,’” says Yasko, “but for museums podcasting has the potential to be both of

those things.”