by Erika Keissner
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I’m reclining in a leatherette chair, surrounded by intimidating, pointy objects, listening to Billy Joel suffuse the room from the PA, eyes falling for the 100th time on a meritless framed poster of trees in mist … and it occurs to me that this is a lot like a museum audio tour. I’m at the dentist’s office, waiting for my exam. There are two other rooms like this one, and almost certainly there are two other patients in them, waiting just as I am. Each of us is in the same type of chair, surrounded by the same unpleasant implements, listening to the same easy rock. Though our experience is identical, it is not shared. We are invisible to each other.
Now picture visitors in a museum using audio tours. There are perhaps a dozen people in the same room, their gazes falling on the same half dozen exhibits, art pieces or artifacts, listening to the same words spoken into their ears in the same voice, but they are each in their own world. They are together in time and space, but their experiences are unshared.
These spaces are typically quiet. Visitors listen carefully to the voice of the curator explaining the exhibition to them. Each one sees the details the voice points out and learns the background and history of the objects. They are hushed and engaged, calmly being educated by a knowledgeable teacher.It all seems very efficient. Which is, of course, the appeal.
From the museum’s point of view, audio tours are an innovation that allows the visitor to have direct access to the thoughts of the curators. The museum can bring the voices of experts to every visitor, at any hour of the day. These tours can hold more content than labels alone. They are cheaper than tour guides and more reliable than volunteers. They can be translated into many languages.
But to me, they have always felt kind of sterile. Isolating. Like a dentist’s office. When you listen to an audio tour, you form a private connection with the curator, making the people you came with outsiders. Worse yet, if you are on a date, the curator isn’t the third wheel—your date is.
Personally, I enjoy the relative messiness of shared conversation and individual observations. The normal chatter of museum visitors is certainly less informative and topical than carefully crafted speeches delivered by a handheld device, but each conversation is unique. Moreover, letting visitors actually talk to each other puts them back at the center of the experience. An audio tour is an alternative to conversation, rather than an augmentation of it. It is a great device to make the curator the focus of the visitor. While that may suit the curator very well, is it the right thing for the visitors? Isn’t there something to be said for the primacy of the viewer?
When visitors share their thoughts and ideas, they have a participatory experience with their discovery of the objects on display. There is a risk inherent here. Visitors can be misinformed or unobservant. They may skip the important parts and choose to focus on the trivial. Worse still, they may not know what to think at all and thus think nothing of an exhibition. They have freedom to follow their own thoughts, but also the freedom to be misled by them.
There is a tension between giving visitors too much and too little information to guide their understanding of an exhibition. It is difficult to find the happy middle ground that gives them a good foundation in a topic and leaves them space to explore their own thoughts. Audio tours, as they are generally implemented, are a poor fit for this ideal. But perhaps with a little tweaking, they could come much closer.
While I would never go to an office that delivered collaborative dentistry, I might go to a museum that offered collaborative audio tours. Imagine if there were several versions of the same audio tour, each somewhat shorter than the original. For a given exhibit, each version would provide the necessary overview required to appreciate the exhibit in context, but then they would diverge. An interesting object or collection has countless details and minutiae, each with a story of its own. Curators, given an audience and the time, could give 10 different talks on 10 different aspects of the same piece, all compelling. Why not let them?
Imagine if visitors on the tours each heard a different perspective on the same exhibit and, more importantly, if the audio tour alerted them to this fact and encouraged them to share their own discoveries with each other. What if the only way that a visitor could get the whole story was to ask another visitor? What if audio tours transformed them from passive listeners into active inquirers and observers?
Through an audio tour, details can be emphasized, compared, organized. There can be crescendos. Appropriate context can be added to any work. Popular myths can be dispelled and historical narratives can be shared. The audio tour represents a great step forward in communicating content to a visitor.
The audio tour could be designed knowing that people visit museums in groups. Perhaps they could even be designed so that slightly different tours were given to groups of different sizes, tailoring the amount of information to the number of people available to share it. The audio tour could be an exploration that each member of the group pursues. It would be messier. Things would be missed. Some of the content would probably be misconstrued, but it would be fresh. Visitors could customize tours for each other, becoming tour guides themselves—picking and choosing which points were interesting and engaging enough to share.
This would be a departure from the aim of audio tours as we know them. It would change the way they are used and which visitors would be most interested in using them. The atmosphere of the museum would become a little louder, but it might also become more organic and compelling. Thoughtful conversations and arguments could ring through the halls. It might be disorganized cacophony. It might be the next big thing.
It would not be nearly as efficient. And one thing it certainly wouldn’t be is sterile. Those are traits I look for in a dentist. A museum can be so much more.
