I’ve always found that that museum displays and exhibit areas can be jazzed-up (pun intended) with an audio background. What has been the experience of railway museums with recorded sounds or music? Who uses music, either rail-theme or period? How about sound effects, like a recording of air compressors or mainline steam recordings? Is it better to keep the sound on at all times, or to use a motion detector activation? Are audio tapes best geared to one artifact should you flood a display barn with sound?

With the price of professional looking video presentations falling, what roll should they play in interpretation? Is it more effective to have a seperate seating area for presentations or to have clips integrated into displays? How long is a good presentation?

I think having a low volume background is good. The restrooms at Sacramento have a steam locomotive whistling but it isn't blasting through your head, just a nice mellow level.

Richard

As with everything, you can do sound well or you can do it poorly. Doing it well can add a lot to an exhibit. Doing it poorly is worse than not doing it.

One of our members found a gizmo called a Shelfspot and bought us about half a dozen or so. Don't bother looking it up, they've quit making them. It's a little box that you can record a short sound bite in. Visitors press a button and the box tells them about the exhibit. We've installed them in our walk-through display passenger train since we don't have a big enough volunteer base to put a docent in each car. If I can ever find some full-figure mannequins, I'll redo the Shelfspot boxes so that the mannequin "tells you" about the car from a particular perspective.

Someone must make a device similar to the shelfspots you found. This sounds like a great idea for some of our exhibits.

Valley Forge National Park installed such a device at the statue of Gen'l Von Steuben, overlooking the Grand Parade where he trained the Continental Army. It had separate buttons to select either German or English.

If you want a very good quality digital message repeater, Mackenzie makes one called the Minimac Compact Audio Message Repeater. It will record up to four minutes of audio. This is professional equipment for 24/7 service. Price is $239 at MCM Electronics www.mcminone.com. Order number is 555-6965.

You will need a loudspeaker. The Minimac has a built-in 4 Watt amplifier. If you need to cover a larger area, you can use a separate amplifier.

How long should your messages be? Only you can answer that question by observing your visitors. If they walk away before it is finished, your message is too long, not interesting, or not professional enough. A polished professional narration will keep their attention much longer than some amateur mumbling away.

Five minutes probably is the absolute maximum length. An old rule of thumb in broadcasting was that listeners will tolerate up to about five minutes of anything but after that they start to tune out.