What is different about audio for an exhibition compared with a campaign?
Listening duration. A campaign track is heard for six to sixty seconds and is therefore allowed to stand out. Exhibition audio plays for hours in the same room, for visitors who sometimes stay ten minutes and sometimes ten seconds. Everything that works in a spot — a hook, a build, a climax — becomes unbearable in a gallery within an hour.
What does that mean for the composition?
Three things that run against advertising instinct.
No recognisable loop. The moment a visitor hears the material repeat, the room gets smaller. Longer pieces with variation work better than a short loop, even though that costs more production time.
No clear beginning or end. Nobody walks in on bar one. Material that can be picked up at any point without missing anything is the norm.
Less register. In a spot, music is allowed to steer the emotion. In a gallery the work is the subject, and audio that tells the viewer what to feel gets in the way. The floor matters more than the ceiling here.
How does gallery sound compare with campaign sound?
| Campaign | Exhibition | |
|---|---|---|
| Listening duration | 6–60 seconds | Minutes to hours |
| Attention | Shared with picture and copy | Subordinate to the object |
| Structure | Builds to a climax | None; enterable anywhere |
| Playback | Phone, TV, earbuds | Gallery speakers, sometimes directional |
| Biggest risk | Disappearing into the noise | Irritating the staff who stand in it all day |
That last point is rarely weighed and is in practice the most common reason gallery sound gets turned down or off after a month. If you do not include the invigilators in the test, you have not tested.
Does exhibition audio belong to the institution’s sonic identity?
Yes, but more loosely than campaigns do. The motif of the audio identity does not have to sound literally in a gallery. What does carry over is the palette: the same instrumentation, the same tonal world, the same sense of space.
That way a visitor who saw the campaign and then visits the exhibition stays in the same world — without getting the audio logo six times per room. The guidelines set out that difference: which elements travel into the gallery and which belong only in campaigns.
When do you bring a studio in?
At the gallery design stage, not at delivery. Where the speakers hang, how loud the installation next door is, and whether two rooms bleed into each other decide more about how it sounds than the composition does. That is architectural and acoustic work that no mix can repair afterwards.
We build the audio identity and the campaign sound; for fully spatial installations we work alongside studios that specialise in that. It is worth drawing that line early, because both get called “museum audio” and they are different work.
More on our approach for museums, festivals and heritage: sonic branding for cultural institutions.