Once a staple of passive learning, the museum audio tour has expanded in recent years into something more resonant and, dare I say, interesting. Museums of all types now include dynamic narration, layered soundscapes, mood-setting music, and other creative touches meant to enrich the experience.
There’s two approaches to audio tours: Letting the audience decide what to learn about vs. offering a set path on which they can embark. The British Museum did some investigating prior to redesigning its audio guide in 2023 and found that “people want the freedom to explore a museum in their own way and in their own time.” Indeed, self-guided or location-triggered audio seems to be the order of the day across the board.
Let’s take a look at a few recent examples of interesting museum audio guides, plus what your team might take away from each approach.
AKGo! at Buffalo AKG Art Museum
The AKGo! app offers a collection of free audio experiences delivering layered sound design, personal stories, and narration from curators, community members, and “unexpected” guest voices. The tours are self-guided explorations of different collections, focused on ideas like light, memory, abstraction, or community. There’s even a playful animal-themed journey designed for children. You can explore each one in detail at the link.
I like this take on a modern art audio guide:
Don’t feel completely comfortable with contemporary art? Art is better with friends. Join Associate Curator Andrea Alvarez and local teacher and comedian Kevin Thomas, Jr. as they playfully discuss what they see, what they think they see, and what it all means.
For even more inspiration, you can explore past AKGo! audio journeys here.
Takeaway for your museum:
This type of tour necessitates letting go of an object-by-object mindset. Could you perhaps build audio experiences around emotion or theme or place, not just what’s in the case or hanging on the wall?
SFMOMA’s Audio Tours
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art also has a rotation of cool (and free) audio tours. Right now, there’s Art Goggles, which turns a museum visit into a game that kids and parents/caregivers can enjoy together. The tone is is playful and participatory, with activities that ask children to imagine and move around and observe.
Artwalk: Truth and Photography is recommended for a specific gallery in the museum but can be taken elsewhere. Filmmaker Errol Morris guides you on a personal, thoughtful, and poignant exploration of photography as a medium. I like how this little interjection from the museum team sets visitors up for autonomy:
Hang on. Sorry to interrupt. Before you go with Errol, I just want to explain that this artwalk will be a little different than the others. Photographs are light sensitive, so we can’t leave them up for very long. We swap them out all the time to preserve them. So that means Errol isn’t going to be taking you to look at specific photographs. He’s going to ask you to look for general types of pictures, like a portrait or a landscape. You’ll find your own way through the galleries and choose which pictures to stop and look more closely at. So feel free to wander in whatever order you choose.
You can listen to the tour or read a transcript at the link above; see how they structure things without referring to a particular artwork. It’s also worth checking out the instruction page that shows how visitors can engage with additional QR code audio stops throughout the museum.
Note: SFMOMA has long been innovative with audio guides. In 2016, they launched a location-aware app that initiated stories based on your location. A piece about Ellsworth Kelly became a reflection on silence. A sculpture in the collection focused on a memory about grief. Some stops didn’t even mention the artist until the very end. Here’s a little write-up about it if you’re interested: The SFMOMA’s New App Will Forever Change How You Enjoy Museums
Takeaway for your museum:
SFMOMA’s current guides are all about open-ended, visitor-centered engagement as opposed to a detailed curatorial analysis. When adopting this style, ponder the type of questions you can ask that help visitors look closely at an object, or connect what they’re seeing to their own lives.
Museums Without Men
Last spring, five large museums — Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Met, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, and Tate Britain — launched audio tours to spotlight works by women and gender non-conforming artists in the museum collections. The launch tied into Women’s History Month, with audio guides giving background on each artist’s life and work along with essential context:
“There are so many amazing stories: At the Met, Rosa Bonheur has a painting called The Horse Fair, which is in a room of female nudes painted at the same time,” said [Guardian art critic Katy Hessel].
“But the reasons she hasn’t painted nudes was because she wasn’t allowed access; animals were accessible but she had to get a permit from the French government to wear trousers and go to this horse fair.
“The tour gives you insight into what women were going through at the time. There are so many layers upon layers in these stories.” (Source: Museums Without Men: audio guides to celebrate dozens of female artists)
Takeaway for your museum: This is a reminder that you can make the intentional editorial decision to declare your institution’s values. You can use your audio tour to critique, to reframe something, or to provoke thought and conversation.
Saratoga Springs History Museum
The Saratoga Springs History Museum in upstate NY offers an AI-narrated audio tour that takes visitors back to the Gilded Age. It’s four hours of content, filled with storytelling and 1800s ambiance, designed to give people a feel for the era’s opulence and societal nuances.
This one is QR code-based, no app required. Exhibits or objects will have a QR code nearby that links to a webpage with numbered audio files, and the files can be played in any order, so visitors are free to roam and cherry-pick. All in all, quite cost effective.
The spoken part of the audio tour was created by simply feeding existing text into AI software; various male and female-sounding voices narrate the text seen on placards throughout the museum. But the rest of the tour’s soundscape is the result of AI’s more creative capabilities. This is most apparent on the third floor of the museum, where exhibits about the notorious Walworth family murder are accompanied by Haunted House-esque sounds of rainstorms, creaking floorboards, howling winds, and disembodied voices. (To fully capture the experience, headphones are recommended.) (Source: Artificial Intelligence Creates “Immersive” Audio Experience at Saratoga History Museum)
Takeaway for your museum: AI could be a practical way to enhance your audio guides, especially if resources are limited. It’s worth a gander. (Hint: Here are a bunch of AI tools as researched by culturehive.)
Speaking of AI, when researching for this article I came across a Reddit post from a user who created their own audio tour using ChatGPT. Aren’t you a little curious to try this at your museum — see what it gets wrong … or right? At the very least, this post is a bit of market research into the kind of info people might want to receive in a tour:
ChatGPT Museum audio tours are amazing
I’d take pictures of paintings or painting descriptions and upload to ChatGPT with a prompt:
“Give me the backstory on the painting and painter in a sassy tone. Highlight juicy gossip and fun facts.”
I’ve never had more fun at a museum. Got to ask any question I wanted, or focus on any area of facts that interested me as a result.
I have a feeling that, as more data pours in, these self-guided audio tours will only get better.
(Source: SmoothAmbassador8 in r/ChatGPT)
Want to explore more innovations in museum audio? Check out our Museum 411 article on The Case for Digital Sound Enhancements in Exhibitions.
