This document discusses the design of a social and participatory project for the NUS Museum that focuses on the museum's soundscape. The NUS Museum has a small confined space and low visitor traffic, mostly consisting of NUS students. The project aims to educate visitors about the museum's soundscape, encourage social interaction between visitors by allowing them to collectively influence the soundscape, and make the soundscape a participatory experience where visitors have some control over it rather than it just being designed by curators. The interactive system is intended to complement the museum experience by being clear and understandable for visitors to use.

1. a social and participatory project
for NUS Museum
Video Prototype

2. Research
 NUS Museum:
 focusing primarily on SoutheastAsian art and culture
 A “conventional museum”
 Confined space
 Low-traffic
 Audience:
 Mostly NUS students

3. Research
 Museum soundscape: the Active Sounds of History (John
Kannenberg)
 Record of soundscape as preservation of memory, museum =
memory-object
 Stacking loops of ambience record: AION (Jacob Kirkegaard,
2005)
 Amplify sound resonance of an indoor, enclosed space
 Merging ambience & sounds from visitors: Interactive Sound
Installation by Andras Kiss,2013
 Create an interactive,organic soundscape can be manipulated by visitors

4. Design goals
 Educate visitors about the physical context of the museum
(its soundscape in particular)
 Beyond awareness:
 Sociality: behavior changes, crowd sourcing of soundscape
 Participatory experience: the shift of control from designers,
curators to visitors, over the museum soundscape
 Interaction model that is suitable to be a complementing
system (clear & understandable), instead of an installation