Neuro-curation: A case study on the use of sonic enhancement of virtual museum exhibits

For the past several years, museums have widely embraced virtual exhibits—certainly before COVID-19, but especially after the virus's outbreak, which has required cultural institutions to temporarily close their physical sites to audiences. Indeed, even once these institutions reopen and the world returns to a new normal, virtual exhibits will remain a defining feature of museums: partly as a means to expand audiences, and partly as a way to increase revenue generation. This paper describes a case study in which a variety of soundscapes were presented accompanying a number of VR objects from the British Museum, in order to determine whether there was any appreciable improvement in viewer engagement with different types of soundscape. Soundscapes were created using synthesis, combinations of foley style effects, spoken word narration, and musique concrete based on a palette drawn from the International Affective Sounds Database. Participants (N=95) were asked to rate their engagement in an online experiment - engagement was highest in the foley-style soundscape condition. This work has implications for future targeted soundscape design, in order to target individual engagement and to facilitate exhibit evaluation, a field we describe as “neuro-curation”.