Immersive Audio

Audio is such a powerful medium.  But most museums and heritage attractions have barely scratched the surface of its potential.  Immersive sound, when allied with the existing sights and smells of your attraction, is the trigger that will send your visitors on a journey to entirely different times and places, to experience your attraction’s story firsthand.

We can design soundscapes using a range of different sound technologies – from headphone-based techniques such as binaural and positional sound, to ambient technologies such as directional, locational and surround sound.

For the National Trust’s magnificent arts and crafts garden at Hidcote, we used binaural sound to bring the garden’s creator, Lawrence Johnston, back to life to take visitors on a tour of the garden and and his life. And for ss Great Britain, we created a locational soundscape that transports visitors back to life onboard in the 1850s, complete with crying babies, giggling children, gossiping women and irate curmudgeons.

Dinah’s extensive production experience and her background at the BBC Radio and TV means each of our projects is produced to the most exacting of standards.  And your creative ideas can be realised using writers and sound engineers who work primarily on broadcast projects, not just churning out formulaic audio tours.

We can also recommend, procure and install the relevant technology – be it a headphone-based experience or a space you want populated with ambient and/or audience-triggered sounds – and provide technical support for as long as you desire.

You can listen to some of the latest examples of our work below. Call us on 01242 256970 or email ben@pastporte.co.uk if you’d like to find out more.

Immersive Helms

Our immersive helms will whisk your visitors back in time via the magic of cutting edge 3D sound. A knight’s great helm transports the wearer into the heart of a medieval battle. A gladiator’s helmet pitches the listener into Rome’s Colosseum, surrounded by the cacophony of the baying mob. A WW1 helmet and gas mask will sink the listener ankle-deep into trench mud with the sound of shellfire exploding all around them.

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Shackleton Immersive Cinema

The Shackleton Immersive Cinema at the Fram Museum, Oslo.

Oslo’s Fram Museum charts the story of Polar exploration, and no recounting of the tales of Antarctic endeavour would be complete without the story of one of Britain’s finest, Sir Ernest Shackleton. The Fram team had experienced Hurley’s Camera but they needed something that could immerse more than one visitor at a time. So we designed the Shackleton Immersive Cinema.

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ss Great Britain Steerage Soundscape

Steerage soundscape for ss Great Britain.

If any historic attraction has been a pioneer in immersive storytelling over the past decade, it’s ss Great Britain. So we were delighted to be asked to design a soundscape for the ship’s new steerage experience. The brief was for visitors to step back into the 1850s as soon as they stepped into steerage, to experience 5 minutes of life onboard during one of the ship’s passenger voyages to Australia.

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A Walk with Lawrence Johnston

'A Walk with Lawrence Johnston' binaural audio tour. Visitors to the National Trust’s Hidcote Manor were spellbound by the beauty of the arts and craft garden but understood little about its history. Our suggestion to the team at Hidcote was to bring its creator, Lawrence Johnston, back to life to take visitors on a tour of the garden and its provenance.

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The Charles Wesley Room

Sympathetic binaural installation at John Wesley's Chapel.

John Wesley’s Chapel is the oldest Methodist Chapel in the world. Above the chapel are the rooms once used by itinerant Methodist preachers including Charles Wesley, John’s prolific hymn-writing brother. The custodians of the chapel approached us to create an experience in Charles Wesley’s room.

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Lady Mary’s Walk

Lady Mary's Walk, Llanrwst, Wales

Challenged to create an audio trail that told the story of the Wynns of Gwydyr (a region just south of Snowdonia, centred on Llanrwst), we could have taken a mainstream approach – just script the story in the third person and get a narrator to read it. But as it was Lady Mary’s Walk, we wanted to bring her to life so the listener could hear her story.

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Gloucester Cathedral Great Lives

Gloucester Cathedral Great Lives mobile phone audio tour.

Gloucester Cathedral has hundreds of stories within its tombs, memorials and stained glass windows. Our challenge was how to tell those stories without cluttering its inspiring space. An audio tour wasn’t a practical solution due to the investment required in hardware but what if we could give visitors inspiring audio content on the hardware in their pockets?

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