Resonance

I’ve been reading about a pilot study done by (it seems) Hewlett Packard and Bristol University. For three  weeks around Easter 2004 people could book out a iPaq (remember those?) and a pair of headphones, and walk around Queen Square in Bristol, listening to a location-based audio drama (or “mediascape“). This write-up isn’t brilliant, but it is based on a good sample, and does touch upon the idea of of periods of emotional immersion brought about by the experience, which the authors identify as “magic moments.”

They can’t cite much evidence for the first type they identify  - being surrounded by a “sea of voices”: one respondent, for example, calls it “quite nice” which doesn’t sound very magical to me. But a second type, which they describe as “Physical and virtual collisions” is better evidenced. What they mean is the sometimes scripted, sometimes accidental, moments of resonance when whats going on in the audio drama echos the physical world, for example: a seagull flies by in the real world co-incidentally as one screams in the audio-drama. Or when a name mentioned at one particular location is visible near-by. I think this resonance of real and virtual is also at the bottom of their third type of magic moment, “synaesthetic confusion” when for example, the sound of a skateboard in the real-world is perceived as the sound of bullets by the listener to the drama. And it also has something to do with their fourth magic moment, which about the realization that you are in the place where history happened. All of this reminds me on the moment that I sat reading Homage to Catalonia in the Mocha cafe on Las Ramblas in Barcelona, and realised  as George Orwell described a gun and grenade fight between to cafe balconies, that I was sitting in  one of the cafes I was reading about.

Without ever using the word then, this paper makes a strong case for resonance as one trigger of emotional immersion


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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