Acoustic Experiences for Cultural Heritage Sites: A Pilot Experiment on Spontaneous Visitors' Interest

Providing technologies to support the visiting experience in cultural venues of artistic value is an important issue that needs to be addressed by considering the delicate nature of the places. Architectural heritage and visual arts are two valuable examples: the most sensible choice for augmenting the comprehension and the experience concerning this kind of cultural heritage is through audio cues (e.g., using audio guides). This work describes a pilot experiment to evaluate the impact of soundscapes and environmental acoustics reconstruction in the visitors' experience. We proposed, to the visitors, an audioguide integrated with an optional experience presenting a comparison between a choir recorded in an anechoic chamber and the same choir as it would have sounded in the Church of the San Martino Charterhouse, using a preliminary acoustic survey. Experiments were conducted with real visitors to maximise the ecology of the collected data and results show that people are significantly interested towards the proposed experience, motivating further efforts to improve the quality and depth of the contents provided with this strategy.