Project description

The project examined the influence of acoustic and semantic audio-text characteristics such as the position of the audio information in the room, speech characteristics, personalization and naming of depicted content on the text-picture processing.

The project examined the influence of acoustic and semantic audio-text characteristics such as the position of the audio information in the room, speech characteristics, personalization and naming of depicted content on the text-picture processing. Especially in museums and exhibitions, the content shown can often only be accessed and understood with a textual explanation. This can be presented in written or auditory form. The modality principle of multimedia learning postulates that when viewing objects or pictures, an accompanying auditory text is better understood and retained than a written text. This is one of the reasons why museums and exhibitions often use audio guides and tours that offer an auditory explanation of what can be seen. This project examined how these auditory explanations must be formally designed to contribute to the greatest possible knowledge acquisition in exhibitions. This was done within an experimental exhibition on inventors and the technical devices they have developed. Subjects received audio explanations of a series of photographic portraits of inventors and their inventions via headphones. The explanations were presented automatically when entering a certain exhibition area. A special audio system was used, which allowed this automated presentation and the variation of the perceived position of the audio source, and by means of which AI-generated audio characteristics are varied.
The results of the study conducted in this project show that the audio quality of the system used was perceived as good to excellent and thus equivalent to conventional audio systems. In terms of interest regarding the inventors and their objects, judgement of learning, and text-picture integration, there were no significant differences between the varying-source audio system and a conventional audio presentation, but the difference in terms of retention performance was significant in that the learning content was better remembered with the varying-source audio system than with a conventional audio presentation. The further investigation of different mechanisms of this effect indicates that this effect is due to externalization, i.e. the attribution of the audio sources to the exterior. For the practice in museums it can therefore be deduced that audio systems with varying audio sources have a positive effect on the retention of the presented content and should therefore be used.

Cooperations

Technische Universität Ilmenau