Over the past few years, the mediation services offered at cultural sites have evolved considerably.
To reach out to new audiences (young people, the cognitively impaired or visually impaired), the traditional audio guide, which originally consisted of audio commentaries (description, context, aesthetic or historical analysis), now takes on a variety of forms, borrowing from the world of sound creation, podcasts or even games.
- Fiction and immersive binaural sound
Inspired by radio dramas, fiction is increasingly used by museums and heritage sites, such as the Confident at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris, designed in collaboration with Radio France, and the immersive sound trail at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte.
As part of the exhibition Enfers et fantômes d’Asie [Hells and Ghosts of Asia] at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the tour took place in the shoes of Wang Miro, a visually-impaired ghost seeking to appeal his conviction before the justice of the Underworld.
Visitors were immersed in the world of the Underworld thanks to a custom-designed immersive environment.
These three projects have in common:
- The use of fiction and the embodiment of words by characters (rather than a disembodied narrator)
- 3D sound mixing (or native recording), which spatializes the sound and reinforces the immersive dimension of the experience
- Podcast codes
Another possible approach for reaching new audiences is to use the codes of podcasts or video formats (broadcast on YouTube, for example).
Since February 2025, the Panthéon, for example, has been offering this type of experience, with a sound stroll embodied by a podcaster, Clémence Gueidan. The sound design also draws on the codes of formats such as Petit Vulgaire and other YouTube channels.
- Augmented reality
3D reconstructions and 360-degree videos bring to life settings and places that have long since disappeared. Examples include the Histopad at the Château de Chambord and the “Revelacio” tablet at the Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, where visitors can also discover how monks lived in the Middle Ages.
- Gamification
In the “Revelacio” tablet project for the Château de Vincennes, visitors meet three temporal guardians, Ada, Finn and Cléo, who find themselves trapped in our own time. Each of the three characters playfully embodies a different dimension of the site: architecture, history and archaeology. Throughout the visit, families will have to work together to solve a series of riddles in order to repair the time clock. These games, inspired by the codes of the espace game, rely on both observation of the players’ environment and parent-child cooperation.
