Science and Technology Museum - Milan

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In years 2003-2004 the acoustic area (now called Audio Section) of Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia was renewed. Goffredo Haus was the responsible for the scientific coordination and the general plan of the project. LIM staff (i.e. Maurizio Longari, Mario Malcangi, and Dante Tanzi) designed and realized the virtual audio experimentation station.

The general goal of the project is providing both to single visitors and to groups:

1. A historic view of the tools and instruments to preserve, record, produce, play and enjoy audio information;
2. An interactive point for presentations oriented to untrained people, using the mentioned instrumentation;
3. A self-service interactive station for either single users or small groups, where computer simulations are used instead of real demonstrations. Here images and sounds are intuitively employed in order to substitute natural language.

Both guided and self-service demonstrations allow an immediate and intuitive enjoyment of audio information. Experiments can be conducted on:

• qualitative and quantitative differences among current and past audio supports and encoding formats;
• qualitative and quantitative differences in sound perception caused by combinations of different tools and technologies in the "audio chain" (the process going from recording to playing);
• qualitative and quantitative differences due to logistic aspects and materials.

Each showcase has a panel with figures and bilingual explanations (Italian and English).

The virtual audio experimental station includes:

• a "sound chains" environment with instruments that can be operated by the user to play, amplify and listen to sound through historic devices;
• a 6-ways high quality audio system;
• sound absorbent and sound reflecting panels;
• a touchscreen PC, with no keyboard nor mouse, using a graphical interface with no need of natural language explanations;
• a virtual environment based on the sampling of real sound chains.

Both in the exhibition and in the experimentation area the most advanced technologies are well illustrated (Blu-ray disc, 24 bit PCM encoding, etc.).