Audio tours are a pretty standard offering at exhibitions nowadays. They’ve become quite sophisticated too, with codes allowing you to listen to the various chapters in any order you want. Usually, though, you’ll have to pay for the privilege of renting the handset, and it’s difficult to tell in advance whether it’ll be worth it.
Increasingly, museums are offering audio tours as free mp3s that you can download to your personal audio player and listen to in the exhibition. This has the advantage that different kinds of audio tour can be offered. In fact, they don’t even have to have been produced by the institution they’re about - anyone can make them. The only problem with this is that you have to remember to download the tour before you go, making spontaneous visits a bit more tricky. However if the downloadable audio tours are interesting and well publicised enough, they’ll be the thing that motivated you to visit the exhibition in the first place.
With that in mind, this post lists some of the downloadable audio tours currently available for museums and exhibitions in the UK. If you do try and of them out, you can post your experience in the comments below (let us know if there any other tours we can add to the list too).
The downloadable audio tours:
- Tate: Modern Paints - A tour of 10 key works currently on display in Tate Modern.
- Tate: Materials, Science and Art - An audio tour of selected rooms in Tate Modern, looking at the works from a scientific and sensory point of view.
- Tate: Art Lookers - An audio tour of the Tate Modern galleries by people involved in their youth programme.
- Canal Museum - A 19 minute audio tour of the museum.
- The National Gallery ‘Be Inspired’ Tour - A tour of key paintings, voiced by the artists, poets and photographers who have drawn inspiration from them.
- The National Gallery ‘Grand Tour’ - A series of separately themed tours, including a ‘lovers’ tour’ and three ‘lunchbreak tours’.
- The Aberdeen Maritime Museum - An audio tour introduction to the museum.
Note: if you’re looking for downloadable audio tours, it’s worth bearing in mind that some museums seem to mistakenly call them ‘podcasts’.
Posted in News.
RSS feed
March 8th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
MuseumPods contains most of the podcasts from museum available on the internet. The Universal Museum Media Widget contains the RSS Feeds to over 130 museums podcasting and over 250 related blogs. All iPhone and cell phone ready. A great resource for schools and students.
March 10th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
A growing trend in the U.S. for audio tours is allowing visitors to use their cell phones to access content. You don’t have to worry about downloading content in advance and the museum can make instantaneous edits to content and learn about usage patterns through online real-time call stats.
March 10th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Hi Kevin,
Museums are starting to try that in the UK too, but generally here people are more concerned with the call costs than in the US. It will be interesting to see if this changes as tariffs get cheaper though.