Contribution
Psst! Listening Conditions in Museums for Musical Instruments
* Presenting author
Abstract:
A museum's room acoustics can be a crucial part of the building's purpose in form of sound design and exhibitions’ arrangements. In fact, well visited Museums often exceed sound levels of comfort (D’Orazio, Montoschi, Garai 2020) and visitors show a better concentration with sound masking congruent to a museum’s soundscape (Bem, Chabot and Braasch 2023). With exhibitions revolving around topics concerning music, the museums’ acoustics could become even more central to the visitors’ experience. Orhan and Yilmazer (2021) found that museum’s acoustics preference comes from the context of the combination of the exhibitions theme and architecture. To see how much room acoustics – specifically the reverberation time – can influence visitors’ experience, five museums and exhibitions about music instruments in Germany and Austria are acoustically measured. The museums visitors are asked to take part in a survey about their experience of the rooms, their perception of the acoustics and if they fit the exhibitions’ topic. In interviews with the curators the museum rooms’ usages and the concept of the exhibition are identified. Through correlation analysis of scaled questions and network analysis of descriptions by visitors the adequacy of the exhibitions’ acoustics is reviewed and contextualized by the curator interviews.