User generated soundscapes activating museum visitors

Museums are seeking various ways to attract and engage audience. Activities like virtual museums, mobile audio guides, augmented reality as well as interactive digital stories aim to provide interactive experiences for an audience with familiarity of digital interaction. Our target is to enable visitor's role change from a passive audience to an active participator as content creator. We concentrate on audio augmentation for museum context because audio provides another perspective into the content in question. In this paper, we discuss our experiences of bringing user generated soundscapes as a part of museums' activities by developing a soundscape platform and a number of mobile applications running on it. Most of the functionality is distributed as ease of use and intuitive mobile applications, which have been evaluated in real context in two workshops. The workshops had different user groups and goals. The first one evaluated ease of use and feelings evoked of the young audiences, and the second one ease of use and acceptance of use for other museums than the Museum of Technology, which was our primary design environment. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).