Designing an Augmented Experience for a Music Archive: What does the Audience Need Beyond the Sense of Hearing?

Abstract

The ARIA project aims to create an engaging visitor experience for archives of music Cultural Heritage that targets the wider public. The challenge is to conceptualize an experience design where the intangible seamlessly meets the tangible, bridging the gap between obscure archival material and the direct and emotional experience of listening to music. The project will apply innovative technologies, such as eXtended Reality (XR) and collaborative digital storytelling, to augment the reception of the musical experience through establishing an affective connection of the visitor with the music composer. In this work we present the results of a user study with 198 participants, designed to assess user expectations and identify concrete needs to inform a multimodal experience design about the composer N. Skalkottas, The results of this study guided the design of an experience which combines a single user immersive VR application to promote reflection on the music piece, with a group participatory digital storytelling mobile app to establish an affective connection with the composer. We conclude the paper with our insights on the effectiveness of the approach as well as how the experience design could contribute to further studying and understanding in a holistic way the factors that play a role in feeling moved by or connected with a composer and his work.