Setting the tone for the visit

This chapter addresses the issue of deliberately using soundscapes in a threshold context to prime the visitors for the impending museum experience thus setting the tone for the museum visit. The soundscape designer performed an aural assessment of the threshold area to determine what types of sound would complement the architectural acoustics. Several proposals were developed for the soundscape component of the intervention to allow varying characteristics to be evaluated by the team. The chapter focuses on the experiences from a design intervention at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London conducted in 2013. It presents a case study that involves a design intervention with a soundscape at the Petrie Museum and as such the project can be considered as a form of action research. The pre-intervention visitor study should establish a baseline from which to ascertain the impact of the design intervention, at the threshold to the Petrie Museum.