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The Museum & Heritage Attraction Guide to Immersive Tech: Binaural Sound

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We use a number of technologies and techniques to immerse visitors in our clients’ stories. Binaural sound is one of the simplest, but most effective.

Binaural sound is so immersive, your visitors will be agape.

Binaural sound is so immersive, your visitors will be agape.

I’m walking through the most English of English gardens – all manicured lawns and artistically sculpted hedges. What I’m hearing, though, isn’t quite so quintessentially English – it’s the distinctly tropical sound of humming cicadas. But despite the fact I know that this is clearly the ‘wrong soundtrack’, my brain is telling me that this distinctive hum must be coming from the garden around me. Such is the power of binaural sound.

Binaural sound is an immersive sound technology delivered via headphones. If you know how to use it properly, you can trick the user’s brain into hearing sounds all around them – to the left, right, behind, in front, above, at different distances and any combination of those directions!

I had the experience described above when testing our audio guide for the National Trust’s Hidcote Manor Garden. The audio brings the garden’s creator, Lawrence Johnston, back to life – binaurally – to take you on a tour of his garden and his life. One sequence takes the listener back to one of Johnston’s 1920s plant hunting expeditions on the South African veldt. My ears were telling me I was in Johnston’s beautiful arts and craft garden. My ears were telling me that I could hear cicadas. And, because of the nature of binaural, my brains was telling me that those cicadas must be in Johnston’s garden.

Our 'Walk with Lawrence Johnston' experience, created for Hidcote Manor Garden.

Binaural sound is so immersive, your visitors will be agape.

Binaural is so effective because, unlike stereo, it’s recorded in exactly the same way the brain hears. Think about how you hear a sound – a sound to your right will be heard by your right ear fractionally before your left ear, and the sound you hear in your left ear will be distorted a little by the fact that the sound is passing through your head en route. You only have two ears (a safe assumption I hope) so your brain can’t properly triangulate. Therefore, it has to work out from these fractional differences, and other contextual clues, exactly where the sound is coming from. If you understand how the brain works, you can ‘trick’ it into hearing sounds in all sorts of places.

For example, one of the common misconceptions about binaural is you can’t make the listener hear sounds in front of them. This is because your sight is a large part of your hearing (bear with me). The brain can’t locate a sound properly with only two sound sources, so your first instinct is to look for the thing that could be making that sound. Once the likely culprit is spotted – for example, a mobile phone when you can hear a ringing – your brain will allocate the sound to this object.

You can use this knowledge to make binaural even more effective if you understand the location your listener is standing in when they listen to it. In our ‘Walk with Lawrence Johnston’, the distant bleating of sheep on the soundtrack coincides with the listener overlooking a distant field of sheep. When I was testing the experience, I couldn’t tell if the bleating was ‘real’ or was part of the soundtrack. Certainly my brain was telling me it must be coming from the sheep – and I was ‘hearing’ that sound coming from a field slap bang in front of me.

Another clue your brain looks for is context. If, by experience, the brain knows a sound comes from a certain place, then this element in a binaural soundtrack will be heard in this place. So the sound of a plane will be heard high above your head, the close yapping of little dogs will be heard down low by your feet, the tweeting of birds will be heard in any tree that is in vision.

The final thing to note about binaural is to do with the nature of sound vs. visuals in our sense hierarchy. Dinah and I have found many virtual reality experiences disappointing partly because we’re so visually dominant, our brains often ‘see through’ the trickery. Because sound is a ‘secondary sense’, it’s easier to fool the brain. We like to say that sound is ‘hardwired’ into the imagination – get it right and it really can be transportative. It’s one of the reasons that binaural sound is so effective. When I first heard those cicadas, my brain said ‘wrong’ but after a matter of seconds it had switched back to focusing on what I was seeing, rather than what I was hearing, and the cicadas became the ‘actual’ soundtrack to the garden.

How can you use binaural sound? Well, you can use it to transport your visitors to wherever and whenever you fancy. We’ve used it to transport listeners from a 21st century shopping centre to a 19th century factory floor, back 300 years in a Methodist chapel to eavesdrop in on the conversations of two of the movement’s founding fathers, and to pitch them into the midst of a medieval battle. But the possibilities are endless.

Imagine for a few moments how binaural sound could enhance a visit to a castle. Other senses are stimulated – visitors can see the walls, towers, moat and courtyard, smell the distinct damp limey odour of the interiors and touch the cold stone walls. Binaural sound – the babble of the tradesman in courtyard, the crackling fire and bawdy banter of the great hall, the low moans from the dungeons – would be all that you’d need to transport your visitors back 1000 years.

Or what about creating a binaural audio tour of one of your experts taking visitors around your gallery? Not only would the commentary be natural – a stark contrast to the stilted scripted audio guides that curse many attractions – but the binaural would make the listener feel they were actually part of that group and that the expert was with them, guiding them around and sharing his knowledge in ‘real time’. How much richer an experience for your visitors would that be?

Whetted your appetite to try some binaural for yourself? Well, fish out your headphones and try one of the sample below and let us know what you think via the comments below.

And if you’d like to know how binaural, or any of the other immersive techniques we’ve described in this blog, could enhance your museum, gallery or attraction, just drop us a line.

Why Multimedia Guides are Often Not the Answer

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Multimedia guides are all the rage.  But that doesn’t mean they’re the right interpretation solution. In fact, in most cases we think they’re the wrong choice. Here’s why.

Don't we spend enough of our day staring at tiny screens?

Don’t we spend enough of our day staring at tiny screens?

You’re about to visit a castle, explore a gallery or investigate a museum. You’re going to scale mighty stone towers, delve into dark and dank dungeons, admire exquisite works of art, marvel at the ingenious artefacts of our ancestors. And, of course, you’ll want to spend a large amount of your time peering at a tiny video screen too.

Sounds odd when you put it like that, doesn’t it? Why would you want to spend time staring at a tiny video screen when you’re surrounded by all that wonderful heritage and culture? But you must want to do it – that can be the only explanation for the plethora of multimedia guides out there.

Look, I have no doubt the multimedia guides are popular – we’re primarily visual creatures and we’re mesmerised by moving images – but that doesn’t make them right. I’ve got 2 children and when I take them to the park, I see plenty of parents mesmerised by the screens on their smartphones when, frankly, they’d be much better off playing with their kids.

I’m not saying multimedia guides are wrong per se, I just think they’re often introduced when they’re not needed – a ‘so and so has got one, so we’ll have one’ phenomenon that doesn’t deliver the best experience for visitors. Besides, museums and heritage attractions have barely scraped the surface when it comes to the potential of audio to enhance their visitor experience.

When we approach each project, we have 2 guiding principles – ‘eyes up’ and ‘augmenting reality’. Let me explain.

‘Eyes up’ is a description of how we want visitors to explore a museum, gallery or heritage attraction – keeping their eyes up taking in the visual feast that surrounds them, rather than down, locked onto a 5 inch screen.

Augmenting reality’ is the job of interpretation – using media to enhance the sights, sounds and smells of the environment the visitor is exploring, not to replace them. Let me give you an example.

When we were approached by the National Trust’s Hidcote Manor Garden, our challenge was to help visitors to understand the history of the garden and its creator, Lawrence Johnston.

Of course, a multimedia guide would have been an option, but do we really want people to be squinting at a tiny screen when they’re exploring one of the world’s most beautiful arts and crafts gardens? That’s an emphatic ‘no’.

Lawrence Johnston, who we brought back to life via binaural audio.

Lawrence Johnston, who we brought back to life via binaural audio.

So we created a pure audio experience. In fact, better than that, we created a 3D audio experience using a little known audio technique called binaural sound. Because it’s recorded in the same way the brain hears, audio recorded in binaural isn’t just heard to left and right like stereo, but all around the listener. It’s an immersive, and often quite spooky, experience.

Using this technique, we brought Lawrence Johnston back to life to take visitors on a tour of his gardens and his life. Visitors felt like Johnston (played by an actor) was with them – sometimes encouraging them to follow him further into the garden, sometimes whispering conspiratorially into their ear. We also used this technique to transport visitors to different times and places – the garden in its 1930s heyday and packed with socialites, or the South African veldt on one of Johnston’s plant-hunting expeditions.

Were there visuals ? Yes – a map to guide visitors around the garden and one static archive photograph to accompany each of the six stories. But our main aim was to ensure that we were augmenting the reality – the beauty of the garden – creating an eyes up experience where Johnston’s enthusiastic descriptions enhanced what they were seeing.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for ‘replacing reality’ sometimes too. We’ve created audio visual experiences that have been designed to stand alone – not working with their environment – because that environment was a gallery offering no other stimulus other than blank white walls and plain wooden floors. Then you have to conjure up something from nothing.

And we’ve created mobile games too – but games that encourage people to interact with the space around them, and to minimise time interacting with the screen.

But the temptation when you have a screen available is to fill it with something – and it’s then you could fall into the trap of creating content that distracts rather than enhances.

Our advice would be to think augment rather than replace. Like you and me, your visitors probably spend too much of their time looking at tiny screens. Free them up to look at something genuinely inspiring for a change.