Designing museums as audiovisual spaces: bridging objective metrics and subjective experience in acoustic design

Abstract

Museum architecture does more than house collections; it actively shapes how artworks are accessed, interpreted, and understood. Room acoustics is one of the design layers through which architecture mediates visitor experience. Yet acoustic experience is rarely treated as a primary design variable, even though the aural environment strongly influences comfort, attention, and communication in galleries. The research follows an integrated workflow spanning immersive evaluation, field measurement, simulation, and perception. A graphical user interface (GUI) supports controlled subjective testing in immersive environments through standardized stimulus presentation, randomization, and in-scene questionnaires. A multi-museum dataset then characterizes exhibition rooms using comparable acoustic measurements, revealing recurring challenges related to reverberation, speech transmission, and background noise. Calibrated simulations quantify how absorption strategies—varying surface location (ceiling, floor, wall) and magnitude (low, medium, high)—affect reverberation, speech clarity, intelligibility, and privacy-related behavior, demonstrating location-dependent tradeoffs that require multi-metric interpretation. Finally, immersive perceptual experiments in simulated environments confirm that improved acoustic conditions reduce perceived distraction, increase intelligibility, and enhance comfort and overall satisfaction. These results are synthesized into a museum-specific guideline framework that defines common acoustic design goals and maps them to architectural levers, supporting earlier and more deliberate integration of acoustics in museum design.