Sound Art Technology Question

[j44ke]

A friend of mine is a sound artist. She creates these sculptures made of natural materials and sound recordings from the areas where the natural materials were collected. The sound is recorded onto a tiny micro-player that is connected to a speaker, the cone of which she makes from collected vegetation. The viewer presses a small button on the wall to play the recording. The sound is not amplified, but it can be heard by leaning towards the work mounted to the wall, whereupon you get a very subtle scent of the grasses and leaves and other things used to create the piece. Very nice, very subtle work.

Recently galleries have requested the pieces be more accessible to viewers who are hearing impaired. The recordings are just too subtle for anyone for an impairment to discern much of anything. And some galleries receive public money for operating expenses, and accessibility is a requirement of that funding. She's tried amplification, but that disrupts the whole intimate aspect of experiencing the work, plus the sounds bleed into each other making the gallery a noisy space counter to her goals for the work. With covid, people don't like putting public-use headphones on, and headphones are expensive and break. And people take them, even in fancy galleries.

She asked me if I knew how museums run their virtual docent technology. These are all mobile phone based. There is a number or a QR code next to a painting that the viewer scans or enters into their phone and listens to the recording of someone talking about the painting. She was hoping that this is some kind of modular local-area cellular or WIFI network in a box with storage that could be loaded with her recordings and set up easily in a gallery. Then the viewer could just scan a QR code with their phone and listen to the corresponding recording while standing in front of each piece.

Does anyone here know anything about these set ups? Are they available in some kind of modular unit that could be set up in a gallery relatively easily? Or are they a cloud-based service? The goal would be to have setup be relatively trouble-free after all the recordings were loaded and set up to correspond to the individual pieces. And to have the connection required not cost money for the viewers of the work. Best I think if it was just local to the gallery - a small box of technology whirring away in an out of the way place.

[sk_tle]

A QR code just store some text information. I guess those museum just redirect to an url. So the artist just need to publish the sound in some storage platform that provide unique url for sharing and convert them to qrcode using one of the myriads of utilities to do that.

[sk_tle]

Exemple of the above theory with a Iora bird sound file from wikimedia I uploaded on a murena cloud account of mine. Accessing the qrcode should direct you straight to the audio file player:



Note: one could be fancier and redirect to a complete rich web page with both text and sound using whatever cms of choice.

[sk_tle]

And the fancier version:



You can have a look at the html code this is just super mega simple, the ogg file type can be replaced by mp3, the text between the <p> tags can be replaced by a description of the art form and the image by a picture of the actual thing. Then your friend can just upload these html files to the web hosting of her choice, possibly with her own domain if she owns one or one purchased for this particular serie of sound sculptures then create and print the qrcodes to give them out to galleries.

Note: it took me literally 2 minutes to prepare this stuff and just almost an hour to wait for the activation of the free hosting plan of a web domain of mine to showcase it.

Keep in mind that this is all on public internet so pictures and sound files can always be downloaded, url kept and shared to other people. A lot of museum used to direct people to a local server with a free wifi but nowadays use a dedicated app, or put the webiste behind an authentication that is temporary given during the day of purchase of the tickets so that people cannot share the whole thing to people who do not pay for it. But in that case that can only really be managed by the art gallery/museum.