Project description

The project examines 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 examines how these auditory explanations must be formally designed to contribute to the greatest possible knowledge acquisition in exhibitions. This is done within an experimental exhibition on inventors and the technical devices they have developed. Subjects receive audio explanations of a series of photographic portraits of inventors and their inventions via headphones. The explanations are presented automatically when entering a certain exhibition area. A special audio system is used, which allows 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. Recommendations for the design of audio systems in museums can be derived from the results of the studies carried out in this project.

Cooperations

Technische Universität Ilmenau