Designing Historically Informed Soundscapes for the Augmentation of Modern Travel-Guides: Challenges and Compromises

Abstract

The design of immersive soundscape experiences, both for artistic and informative purposes, is an established field in Auditory Display. This paper describes the process of designing historically informed soundscapes to be incorporated in modern travel-guide applications. The work stems from the research project TRACCE (TRavelogue with Augmented Cultural & Contemporary Experience), which focuses on the design and development of a platform for augmented cultural routes. Using this platform, hikers can follow the journey of 18th and 19th century travelers, having access to the original travelogues, tracked routes, and a wide variety of modern information. User experience is augmented by means of visual and auditory reconstructions of the original surrounding environments in several identified points of interest in each path. Apart from the creative process and technical details, the paper discusses the design challenges, which mainly stem from a) the limited data available which would allow an accurate and convincing reconstruction of the acoustic environments, b) the need for diverse auditory displays which would grasp the users’ attention, and c) the difficulty in designing soundscapes which would be interesting, appropriate, and informative for a wide audience of various age groups, educational backgrounds, and sensory abilities.

Towards an Ex-Situ Ecologically Valid Soundscape Evaluation Methodology Using Immersive Audio

“…Additional sources of information included iconography and sketches of the specific locations of interest dating back to that era, contemporary photographs and cartography of the same locations today, as well as any other sources of information we could find on these locations. These additional sources were necessary as they provided invaluable information on the morphology of each place and its acoustic characteristics [31].…”

“…Soundscapes were designed for audition over headphones featuring 4 layers of auditory content with which users can interact independently or in any combination they prefer or need. Each layer contains different types of auditory content and carries different levels of information [31]. The Background layer comprises sounds that reconstruct the main auditory content of the landscape (such as wind, air etc.)…”