Thursday, October 08, 2015
Taking A Second Look
Sound & Video Contractor: There is no shortage of statistics and studies demonstrating that we’re on the right track. But I’m inspired by a more immediate, experiential kind of evidence that I want to share before I delve into how adding audio capabilities to digital signage can help your business. I want to suggest that the inherent compatibility of spoken words and visual images can be found in the human form. Certainly there’s a good reason that we have two ears and two eyes. The foundation of most of our experience, it seems to me, is the combination of what we see and what we hear.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I completely agree with this article, which argues the case of paying more mind to the A in AV, as media in theatre and out in the world tends to focus on the visual representation, with very little media/sound synthesis taking place. An example provided by the article doesn't have to do with media in the theatrical form, but the idea of immersive app development. Museums are slowly migrating their audio experience to phone apps, so that the audio tour is completely self-guided and requires no human output from the museum itself. IF the whole world starts to lean towards this, we start to see hints of dystopia, as the human employees get phased out and replaced by more efficient and less costly apps. However, the interfacing and ease at which the information is available makes a compelling case for the phasing out of certain human employees. The sound is a very important piece of this puzzle, as people respond more positively to genuinely human voices as opposed to robotic synthesized voices. So there is still a human element involved. Just a cheaper one.
This article is completely right about the importance of putting the consumer in control. When I hear about the incorporation of audio in retail and educational displays, I immediately cringe as I think back to unrelenting, repetitive, impersonal audio recordings that talk at you for seemingly no other reason than to justify their own existence. This is obviously what we want to avoid.
By creating more flexible, user-directed installs, the power of audio-video incorporation can be harnessed.
The article also makes an interesting point of the new possibilities made available thanks to the rise of the smartphone. It is becoming increasingly accurate to assume that most all members of the general public are outfitted with a device that can connect them to local and world wide networks. By utilizing location-based technology (nod to GPS filters on snap-chat) the user experience can become very directed and effective with considerable ease and with little necessary integration, because smart phones are a tool people are already accustomed to using. With new apps and software-hardware linked projects and products being released, the expanding possibilities are being realized.
Post a Comment