Try this tour: Minnesota's Dakota War

While the Civil War sesquicentennial gets a ton of attention (and a bunch of great tours) this year, here in Minnesota we're also marking the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota War -- a conflict that led to the largest mass-execution in U.S. history. The war took place across a broad swath of the Minnesota River valley in the summer of 1862 and evidence of it has mostly disappeared.

U.S.-Dakota War audio tour stops along Minnesota River
Valley Scenic Byway.  (from MNHS)

The Minnesota Historical Society just launched a cell phone tour that brings the stories of the war and the tumultuous years around it to life in places all over the valley -- like St. Peter, New Ulm, the Lower Sioux Agency and Montevideo. It's a good example of an effective scenic byway tour -- letting a story unfold as the miles pass by -- and I'm excited to drive a big chunk of the route next weekend. I'll post a review when I'm done, but I can already tell that MNHS makes wide use of their extensive oral history collection. Placecasting is an excellent way to unlock the unique insight of those dusty old tapes.

In the meantime, here's the map. The brochure (.pdf link) that accompanies it is also a good thumbnail overview of the war. No map is really necessary though: call 1-888-601-3013 to sample the tour. Use #01 for the overview.

North by Northside: MPR Sound Points at Five Points Building

Thanks to Hawthorne Hawkman for writing about our Sound Point project! Looks like he saw the QR codes posted in the window of the stil-empty storefront at Penn and Broadway. Glad someone bothered to stop and scan the codes on a cold day.

He makes a good point about having a hard time posting the links on Facebook. Anyone have ideas of how to fix that?

North by Northside: MPR Sound Points at Five Points Building: Post, photos, and video by the Hawthorne Hawkman. Almost a year ago, I did a blog post about one idea of the many nifty things one c...

Audio Slide Show at Minnesota's Split Rock Lighthouse

Here's a long overdue update to the first stage of our new Minnesota placecasts:

The signs are at the printer and will soon go up in Duluth! Visitors to the iconic Enger Tower will soon have the chance to hear audio "tours" from local experts about the fascinating landscape below the tower. CLICK HERE to preview the tours. Any feedback is welcome.

Signs for our first seven Minneapolis murals will go up in September as well. More exciting is that we're now partnering with the city to create a dozen more artist interviews to be accessible at works of public art throughout the city. I'm interviewing the artists now and those will hopefully be available this fall.

I'm also overhauling the historical tour of the Northstar Rail Line. It'll feature interviews and audio rather than just me chattering on. It'll be ready this fall, but since most winter Northstar runs happen before dawn and after dusk, we may not launch the new version until next spring.

I haven't had any time to review new tours around the country, but there are more and more coming out each day. I'm excited our friends at the Minnesota Historical Society have created a walking tour of the State Fair this year.

There's also a must-hear presentation by former NPR producer Bradley Klein about "Designing and Producing Audio Tours" at the Association of Independents in Radio web site.

Summer is winding down. Keep discovering news sounds and places while you can!
-Jeff

Minneapolis Murals first draft

Here's a preview of the Minneapolis Murals Project I'm working on. I used Google Fusion Tables to create this map. I'll be able to add other projects to the same map as they come on line. I'll only publish the murals now because it's the one project where the audio is actually ready.



Soon the audio will be available on-site via SMS/phone and hopefully we'll get a mobile web site up as well.

Signs for Placecasting

As I work on creating a few sets of Placecasts around Minnesota, I'm thinking about what the signs should look like to let people know the audio is available. I'm going to collect sign images here. Feel free to send some in:

I found this at the Lincoln Memorial one night. Simple cell phone interface with a good preview of the topics:

A much more mysterious set of signs in Toronto. No hint of the content, but high "cool" factor that must have generated calls:

A Mansion, a Museum and Music

Some placecasts I've seen in the news recently:

The Vanderbilt Breakers Mansion

• A Seattle Post Intelligencer blogger mentions the audio tour of the famous Breakers Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island this week. A two hour tour sounds too long to me in an old house, but there are 20 bathrooms to get through. The tour sounds like much more than narration. It includes sound effects (which can be a great touch or profoundly cheesy) and oral histories from people who lived at the mansion. The audio producer's description of the tour is actually a great read and includes these details:

"'The push for audio tours grew out of an effort “to become more relevant and engaging for our visitors and to move away from a specifically fact-based guided tour,” said John Tschirch, the preservation society’s architectural historian and director of academic programs....The recording includes narration, sound effects, commentary from architectural experts and past servants, and readings of memoirs of Vanderbilt family members...'You entered the house as a Vanderbilt or guest, now you entering the dining room as a servant' is the new approach of the audio tour, which relies on hallways used by servants that weren’t open for guided tours."

(Speaking of Rhode Island, here's a great short audio story from NPR on Friday about R.I.'s famous weenies. I wonder if the Vanderbilts served these at garden parties...)

• A National Geographic exhibit currently at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is using the voice of Cleopatra to narrate an audio tour if it's exhibit all about...Cleopatra. According to a story in Philly.com: "After a five-minute video introduction, an audio tour delivered as if the queen herself were speaking, fills visitors in on the details of her life." Yikes. The writing and voicing had better be exceptional to pull this sort of thing off. But the audio tour sounds old-school compared to the other features of this high-tech exhibit: "The exhibit includes high definition multimedia, original soundscapes and a mobile-based social media scavenger hunt." National Geographic knows a lot about education and interpretation, so I'm very curious to hear how this exhibit is received.
• The award-winning Toronto Music Garden is packed with music and dance from now through September. The outdoor garden and performance space is, literally, inspired by Bach (for example, the "Prelude" is a "An undulating river scape with curves & bends", followed by the "Allemand", "A forest grove of wandering trails"...etc.) In a $6 70-minute audio tour now available near the park, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and landscape architect Moir Messervy explain how they turned music into a park. This concept is so well tailored for placecasting that I'd be disappointed if such a tour wasn't available. (via Music Industry Mews Network)
  

  

  Toronto Music Garden (via City of Toronto)

Art and audio in the aisles

Grocery stores are dizzying places. So many choices. So much information. Flashy packaging. Conflicting priorities. I've stood staring and hopeless at the wall of soup cans too many times to count. Do I choose price or flavor or nutrition or ingredient or serving size or natural or local? If Donovan McNabb's mother eats this soup, shouldn't I?

So how nice would it be if someone replaced those voices in my head with an artful, musical take on the grocery store experience? Apparently, Rotozaza has done that. The UK-based artists have produced a half-hour audio tour of the supermarket -- ANY supermarket with more than 10 aisles.

Director Silvia Mecuriali is quoted in this Australian newspaper story:

“It plays around with the ideas of consumerism, reclaiming public space and using it in a different way,” Mercuriali said.

“It takes a mischievous swipe at the dominance of supermarket culture and consumerism.”
But you don’t have to buy anything and the people around you become extras in your own private “guerrilla-style” show.

The 30-minute tour guides the shopper through food sections, with the music changing to reflect the frozen food area, dairy, and fruit and vegetables.

I'll review the audio if I can get a copy -- right now it's only available to people who buy tickets for another theater performance in Melbourne.

But here's what's interesting. This is a placecast that isn't tied to a specific place, but rather to a KIND of place. The audience has to be somewhere to appreciate it, but not necessarily in the same place it was recorded. This works because grocery stores in much of the world now have more similarities than differences -- a fact worthy of reflection in itself.

This isn't historical interpretation, but rather societal deconstruction. And audio is still the perfect medium. "Wearing headphones and anonymous behind your trolley [shopping cart]," the project's Web site says, "you are guided around the aisles immersed in a private world, as the carefully constructed sound scape overlays a fictional world that blurs the real with the imaginary."

Using sound as the primary medium allows the audience to still participate in the physical world, while their thoughts about that place are being directed and informed by the audio program. There's no need to stare at a smartphone screen or tap away on a laptop keyboard.

What other places in our world are similar enough for this kind of placecast? Would it work anywhere beyond the homogeneous world of retail stores, fast food joints...maybe airports?

I'll explore this whole concept further, driven in part by this intriguing line from the Rotozaza Wondermart press release:

Rotozaza are the pioneers of Autoteatro, a new kind of performance where, by receiving and following instructions through headphones, audience members assume the roles of both actor and observer and thereby create a self-generating piece of theatre.

Of course that makes everyone else in the supermarket unwitting extras in your own private performance. This sounds so much better than staring at soup cans.

(photos by Ant Hampton via Rotozaza)

T.O.U.R. in the USA - A Mellencamp audio tour

Seymour, Indiana has been trying to cash in on its most famous former resident for a long time. Indeed, rocker John Mellencamp's heartland mystique is "one of the larger attractions to the area" according to Jackson County Visitor Center director Tina Stark.

Now, Cougarphiles and rock pilgrims can roam Seymour with a CD driving tour featuring Mellencamp memories, factoids and music.

Did you know the Mellencamps have lived in Jackson County for 150 years? Did you know John's mother threw out his first written songs? Do you know who ELSE is on the Seymour High School Wall of Fame? The tour knows...

From the Seymour Daily Tribune:

“It was originally just the brochure, but we were looking for a way to creatively put together a new experience for our visitors,” Stark said. She said the CD offers information the listener could not have gotten anywhere else and more personal information about Mellencamp.

Those lending their memories and stories about Mellencamp are his mother, brother, sister, former teacher, friends and former girlfriends.

The tour is narrated by Dan Osborne and features 16 of Mellencamp’s hit songs, including “Small Town,” “Human Wheels” and “R.O.C.K. In the USA.”

The audio tour has been in the works for five years. Stops include Mellencamp's boyhood home, his junior high and high school and several other local landmarks.

The CD is apparently only available at the visitors center, so I haven't been able to preview it. But I'm optimistic that it's more than tourist schlock. What gives me hope is that so much of Mellencamp's music is rooted in place and memory. He both celebrates and laments the qualities of small town Middle America.

So fans will recognize the significance of tour stops like Larrison’s Diner and the Rok-Sey Roller Rink -- even if they're not directly referenced in Mellencamp songs. Also, any tour creator who seeks out interviews with former girlfriends must understand the power of oral history in placecasting. And in this interview with NPR's Fresh Air, Mellencamp talks about how his early experience with racial issues still affect his lyrics today. If the tour can connect those dots between place, people and art, it should be worth the time (and the $14 price tag).

Now I wonder how many little pink houses are along the route.

(Here's a more detailed review of the tour from Jane Ammeson, of the Northwest Indiana Times)
(Main street Seymour photo from a very nice placeblog about U.S. Route 50 called Rte50.com)

It's ready! Northstar rail audio tour

My audio tour of Minnesota's new Northstar Commuter Rail Line is ready to go. The service has been running for five days and now riders can learn a bit about the towns and cities along the way. This tour talks about some of the buildings along the route (like Minnesota's first car factory and its first nuclear power plant) and about the history of the corridor, which Canadian fur traders were traveling in oxcarts 190 years ago.

Download the audio tour here. (.mp3 file, 9.8mb...right-click to download)
Here's an enhanced iTunes version with chapters if you have an iPod. (left-click to go to iTunes)

This audio file is meant to be used on the train, starting at Target Field in Minneapolis. It's one 20 minute file, broken into 5 chapters...one for each station. At the end of each chapter, it asks listeners to pause the audio until they leave the next station. There's about 20 minutes of information in all for the 51 minute trip.

I hope to create a second podcast for the inbound trip, but at the moment none of those morning trips happens during daylight hours.

If you listen to this podcast, I would LOVE to hear feedback. There's a lot more I want to do with this tape (add interviews and natural sound), and I want to know what you'd like to hear in the next version.

Podcasting Northstar

On Monday, I got to take a preview ride of the new Northstar Commuter Rail line from Minneapolis to Big Lake.  For train geeks, the opening of the new line (it opens to passengers on Monday, Nov. 16) marks a hopeful new era for rail travel in Minnesota. 

Practically, though, Northstar is about commuting to work...and not much more.  The timetables are set to get people into Minneapolis in time to get to work and to get them back home shortly after work is done.  Don't plan to stay downtown for a few drinks or a show because the last train out leaves at 6:10pm.

Nor should you expect to take a day trip from the city to beautiful Elk River.  Downtown ER is a really nice place, with a great view of a meandering Mississippi River...but the Northstar station isn't anywhere near downtown.  If you're daytripping, you'd better have someone ready to pick you up at the station.

All that said, Northstar will be great for thousands of commuters who want to avoid traffic on Hwy. 10 and relax a bit on the way to and from work.   My project is to create a podcast for people who ride the line to learn about the places they'll see along the way. 

The corridor from Minneapolis to St. Cloud along the east side of the river is full of history:  it was one of the main oxcart trails to St. Paul from the Red River Valley from the 1820s to 1870s.  Elk River housed the nation's first nuclear power plant.  Big Lake was a major source of ice for Twin Cities ice boxes.  Anoka is still home to Minnesota's first major mental health treatment center.

And of course there are the railroads.  The Northstar runs along track laid by the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad in the 1860s.  That track later became a key part of James J. Hill's Great Northern empire.  Passenger trains ran along the line for over 100 years (actually, one still does: Amtrak's Empire Builder makes one run per day in each direction on its route from Chicago to Seattle).  The rails are now owned by BNSF and that company's engineers will man the Northstar trains.

There are stories about American migration, agricultural and industrial development and our changing approach to living and working to be seen and heard on this train trip.  I'm trying to compile those stories into a podcast that's both place-specfic and easy to digest.  This isn't a lecture, it's a journey.

I hope the project will be done in the next couple weeks for any new riders of the line to enjoy.  Because I critique a lot of podcasts here, I'm going to try to take a lot of my own medicine in the writing and producing.  Wish me luck.

(Photos are mine.)

Scenic byways are made for audio touring

I'm working on a more complete list of audio tours along the Mississippi River. See Northeast Minneapolis, Wisconsin's Great River Road, and Quad Cities for some good examples. But I know there are more out there. I'm thinking of you, St. Louis...

Tonight, my search brought me to this driving tour page from the National Scenic Byways Program. It lays out a great, take-your-time style 2-day Mississippi River trip in Wisconsin. What's more, it almost precisely follows the route of the Great River Road Stories audio tour I wrote about in May -- still the best audio driving tour I've sampled so far, with interpretation of the cities, landscape and history all along the way. These sites are prefect companions for one another and it makes my wonder why more byways don't have this sort of grassroots audio tour.

The Scenic Byway Program is relatively new. It started in 1992. There are 125 designated routes all over the U.S. that meet a certain criteria. From the Byways.org:

The U.S. Secretary of Transportation recognizes certain roads as All-American Roads or National Scenic Byways based on one or more archeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational and scenic qualities.

If you must travel by car, these routes are a great alternative to the Interstate highway system. The program stimulates local economies, highlights scenic or historical sites, and it helps the towns along the way work together -- like the Wisconsin Great River Road Stories group did. Oh, and the Byways are apparently becoming more bike friendly (though road biking isn't encouraged on the Wisconsin road yet).

Just last week, the Department of Transportation announced 41 million dollars of new spending on the Byways, including a lot of money focused on interpretation. Signs and visitors centers are great, but I think all 125 of these routes should have audio tours about the sights and cities along the way. After all, you're sure not going to watch YouTube videos in the car.

(photos from byways.org)

Canoeing the Mississippi on the radio

I don't spend much time "on air" in my job. I'm more comfortable calling the shots on the other side of the glass from the microphones. But the latest place-based project at Minnesota Public Radio was my idea and I took the opportunity to voice one of the stories myself.

During the week the Ken Burns documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" aired on PBS, I wanted to air stories about the National Park Service sites in Minnesota. Five days, five parks -- how perfect.

The full series is here. Three of our reporters in greater Minnesota were nice enough to be part of the project and they made three surprising stories about places I think most of our neighbors don't even realize exist in our state: Voyageurs National Park (which still has a tense relationship with its neighbors), Pipestone National Monument (which still offers a working -- and sacred -- rock quarry) and Grand Portage National Monument (which is a grand experiment in dual management -- half federal government, half Native American tribe).

Last Friday, on the last day of the series, I went into the broadcast booth to talk about my experience in Minnesota's most unusual National Park site, the Mississippi National River and Recreation area (which has virtually no land of its own, but enviable access to millions of visitors). Here's the audio:

I know this is broadcasting rather than placecasting, but there is a close relationship and the same qualities of presentation, information and surprise are key to both. But with broadcasting, it's more important to paint pictures for the audience and include sound to put them in the location. (With placecasting, of course, they're already there!) In this case, the sound of kids having a blast in the canoes is priceless.

Oh yeah...the fifth park is the St. Croix National Scenic River. We share that one with Wisconsin (kinda like Brett Favre, eh?). We didn't send a reporter there, but we had a good phone conversation with one of the rangers there.

(image from MPRNewsQ.org)

Central Park cell phone tour

The folks at Walking New York tweeted about cell phone tours in Central Park last week, and since they posted a handy photo, I decided to call the number give it a try.

The random tour stops I sampled are well done. They feature some big New York personalities (such as restauranteur Danny Meyer, actor Mandy Patinkin and TV star Alec Baldwin) reading short bits of history related to the stop you're at.

The information at The Dairy covers the history of the building there, some info about poor public health in the early 1900s, and isn't afraid to talk about the corrupt Boss Tweed administration that turned the building into a popular watering hole.

The Central Park Conservancy created the tour and offers a good printable map of the tour stops.

These are really just actors reading scripts, but the scripts are pretty well written and the actors are top-notch. Some personalize their scripts (Mandy Patinkin spent a lot of time on the carousel as a kid. Who knew?) The information is mostly historical, but it also offers advice about how to enjoy the park and what to find inside the buildings you see. The scripts avoid hyperbole and tourist-propaganda. Other than an introductory music stinger, these stops don't use background music or sound effects and I don't miss either one.

The tour doesn't take advantage of location as well as it could. Even though the creators know right where you are, most stops don't direct your eyes to particular details of the landscape around you. But stop #9, for example, does point out some details (flowers nearby) that you might otherwise overlook.

The length of each stop seems just right and the cell phone interface is very easy to work with. This is a really nice addition to Central Park that both visitors and residents will find interesting.

The New York Times CityRoom Blog gives its take here.

(photo from brettsea on yfrog)

Killing time during Ken Burns

(9/29/09 UPDATES at bottom)

I know I should be watching The National Parks: America's Best Idea with rapt attention, but I find myself able to multi-task just fine. So tonight I've been exploring Yellowstone via Google Earth -- flying through the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, looking for bison in the open fields, being underwhelmed by the geysers (note to self: some things are better photographed from the ground than from space).

But I was surprised to stumble across this 3D building.

If you've been there, you'll know it's the beautiful Old Faithful Inn, just steps away from its namesake geyser.

So now I'm wondering...what other 3D buildings are there in National Parks? I flew to other parts of Yellowstone with no luck. I went to my favorite lodges in Glacier NP, but only saw grainy rooftops. I'm sure the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are in 3D (everything in New York is in 3D now, isn't it?), but what other monuments, lodges or national icons are in 3D in our National Parks?

Go hunting and let me know.

UPDATE:
Here are some other good 3D renderings from national parks.  First...Devil's Tower National Monument in Utah.

This one surprised me...from Mesa Verde in Arizona:

And, of course, Mt Rushmore in South Dakota.  Even in person, this place is a little creepy.  It's even stranger in Google Earth:

So what else is out there?  Keep looking and let me know...

One good Yosemite tale

The first episode of the long-awaited National Parks documentary from Ken Burns premiered tonight on PBS featuring, almost exclusively, two parks: Yosemite and Yellowstone.

Watching it reaffirmed what I've known for a while: that I really need to go see Yosemite. Visiting Yellowstone with my family a few years ago was life-changing. I hear Yosemite can have the same effect.

So now I'm going hunting for Yosemite placecasts, and the first thing I ran across was a nice bit of audio storytelling from the National Parks Conservation Association. In 2007 and 2008, it produced a well-done series of podcasts about parks across the country. The first episode was about Buffalo Soldiers in Yosemite. Apparently, while the park was under state jurisdiction (before it became a national park), a regiment of african-american soldiers guarded the area from locals who weren't happy about the land being so stringently protected. I have a feeling this tension will be a theme of the whole Ken Burns series.

In fact, the ranger featured in this podcast, Shelton Johnson is also quoted extensively in the PBS series. He dresses up as a Buffalo Soldier and surprises visitors with the stories of what the park was like "back then" and with the fact that African-Americans were involved in the early history of this place. At one point, Johnson says that African-American visitors find this bit of living history especially welcoming in a place where they didn't expect to see many other non-white visitors.

(That was a point I hadn't really thought about before this week, when I was interviewing the superintendent of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. I'm working on a radio story about school kids taking canoe trips down the river in St. Paul and one of the things that Superintendent Paul Labovitz told me is that the visitors to his park are much more diverse than other parks...mostly by virtue of proximity to an urban area. He said the park service is aware of who is visiting its parks and wants to make them more appealing and welcoming to all groups.)

I don't know why NPCA stopped making it's Park Stories podcast after only a handful of episodes, but I wish it would start again. They were good introductions to various parks without trying to be exhaustive overviews. Instead, they highlighted one particular story in each place. I know there are thousands more stories just as interesting that need to be told. Audio is a great -- and relatively easy -- way to tell those stories.




(photo from NPCA by Jim Williams)

Audio guides: the public is skeptical

I just stumbled across the best audio tour-related rant I've seen yet on the Internet.

Loic Tallon is a museum designer who blogs at Musematic.  Back in June, he titled a post: "I never take audio guides. I can't stand them."  This wasn't his personal opinion, but an oft-overheard line from museum visitors who have been burned too often by bad or poorly-implemented audio guides. 

While he first tried to argue with the people who said this, he came to realize the sentiment was widespread enough to indicate a real problem with the way this technology is maturing. From the post:

I’ve come to believe that it’s not the visitor’s fault that they can’t stand audio guides. They’re actually the victims in all this; the museums are the culprits.

Let me explain how I see it.... A visitor arrives at a museum and, before breaching the gallery threshold, is obliged into an early decision.  “Would you like to take the audio guide?” the museum asks.

It seems like a simple question.  But if we stop and look at this from the visitor’s perspective – a reasonable action considering audio guides are a visitor service – they’re probably asking themself: “Well, why in the devil is there an audio guide, and why should I take it?  Especially if they want me to pay extra for it!”

Time was when just having "multi-media" technology at an exhibit was novel.  It isn't anymore.  You have to be purposeful in explaining why a visitor needs or might want to consider taking the audio tour.  At some places, it is essential (Tallon refers to the excellent audio guide at Alcatraz, for example)...at most others, it is a nice supplement to other interpretation already in place.  So museums have to tell visitors what the advantage of the guide is.

...if we provide no information, and simply advertise to visitors that ‘audio guides are available’, we’re actually encouraging visitors to draw on personal notions of whether they like audio guides in order to decide whether to take it or not.    

Tallon also reiterates what I gather is a guiding mantra amongst museum techies: "It's not about the technology." Here's my favorite part of the post:

Like the cinema, the audio guides itself is not, and should not be presented as, the deal clincher.  I know that ‘sexy’ technologies like multimedia tours, and IPodTouches/IPhones currently act as deal clinchers, but like an I-Max, after a couple of experiences, I’m sure the novelty will wear off.    

In this funny and insightful piece, Tallon stops just short of what I think is the logical conclusion of his argument:  The content rules and the presentation matters.  People are tired of sticking speakers in their ears and hearing boring or silly factoids about the stuff around them.  If audio is going to help your exhibit, it needs to take advantage of the power of the medium: voice, story, music, pacing and even -- gasp -- silence.  Reading a guidebook into a microphone doesn't cut it anymore.  Interviewing the curator about the exhibit won't do it. Visitors expect, and deserve, an engaging experience -- and an explanation up front of what that experience will be like.

One more thought on Museums.

When it comes to creating place-specific audio, museums are leading the way.  They are WAY out in front of historic sites, tourist boards and chambers of commerce in creating audio enhancements to the visitor experience.  This makes sense.  Museums are hyper-planned, self-contained environments that are designed by professional interpreters (many of whom blog and write and meet about new technologies all the time).  The most successful trends in placecasting will no doubt have their roots in museum interpretation.  All the same, I'm most interested in what is happening out of doors.

To me, the exciting part about the idea of placecasting is meeting people where they are at...in the real world.  When there are no interpretive signs or tour guides around, mobile audio takes on new importance and new potential.

More from Cleveland: Crittercasting

After posting a maybe less-than-flattering video about Cleveland a few days ago, I'm pleased to say there is positive placecasting going on in the Forest City, too (seriously, that's an actual Cleveland nickname).

The Cleveland Metroparks Zoo just announced its new cell phone audio tour is live and ready to take your call as you wait for that critter over there to wake up. Like most museum tours, it's not really a tour at all, just a series of sign posts telling you which number to punch into your phone. There are 33 stops at the moment (according to this press release), though the medium is inherently expandable.

Though I'm not in Cleveland at the moment, I dialed the number while watching my own cat sleep. After a quick welcome and not-so-quick advertisement for a local cell phone company, I was asked to entering a stop number. I chose the numbers at random because I can't find a list of the stops anywhere -- including the zoo Web site, which makes no mention of the audio tour at all (but why should it if its meant to be listened to on-site?). The items I heard were interesting, brief and specific to the animal or building at that location. Each tells a story -- why the animal is endangered, or how it is cared for by vets -- that was concise and didn't seem likely to duplicate the signs around the exhibit. One stop I heard even featured a zoo employee talking about her favorite memory of a given zoo building -- a nice, genuine touch. My cat, by the way, remained asleep throughout.

The main presenter is a voice actor who is full of energy. But my main beef with this project is that he seems to make up a new cartoonish voice for each stop along the way. I found most of these phony accents to be over-the-top and distracting from what were otherwise decent scripts with good information. Maybe these voices are meant to engage kids...but without any sort of character development (and who has time for that?), they just seem random and unnecessary.

Fortunately, most tracks invite feedback from the listener, telling them to press a button to leave just this kind of comment. This acknowledges the new and experimental nature of the project, and also made use of the dynamic possibilities of the cell phone medium, which got me thinking...

Cell phone tours have the obvious disadvantage of poor audio quality (compared to podcasts delivered on mp3 players) and air-time charges. But they hold a distinct advantage in their ability to be updated quickly and universally. Indeed, the zoo's marketing manager, SueAllen, told the Plain Dealer newspaper, "these can change on a daily basis." And you can understand why this is important to a zoo, where exhibits are changing all the time based on the weather and the health of the animals (this isn't so much a problem in art museums where the sculptures rarely have to visit the vet). A change to any stop on cell phone tour will be realized by every single visitor who calls the number after the change is made. In contrast, any site trying to dynamically update podcasts that users download ahead of time will face problems with all the "stale" versions already downloaded.

Another very slick feature of the Cleveland zoo cell phone tour is the option to see behind-the-scenes video. At stop number three, the narrator (in an inexplicably German accent) told me to press the * button to receive a text message link to a video of a gorilla getting an ultra sound. It worked like a charm. A few seconds later, I was watching a YouTube video of this remarkable procedure on my iPhone. This is truly value-added content and the possibilities for placecasting are magnificent.

While I still think clear-crafted audio is the key to placecasting success, optional video can allow visitors into places they'd never get to see otherwise. Guide By Cell is the production company behind this project. It caters to non-profits and seems to have a lot of tricks up its sleeve.

If you know of other zoo audio tours, please let me know.

Placecasting battlefields

At it's most basic, I describe placecasting to people as having your own personal park ranger whispering in your ear as you walk around a place.

I found the most literal application of that description so far when I started previewing the audio tour podcasts at CivilWarTraveler.com.  This company has partnered with the National Park Service at Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Antietam, Appomattox Court House and other sites in and near Virginia to make audio tours of certain important parts of the vast battlefields (think the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg or the Burnside Bridge at Antietam).


The free podcasts on this site feature on-site recordings of real rangers and historians talking about the very spot where you are standing.  They point out features if the land around you, and off in the distance.  They describe how the battle progressed around this point and then they tell you (roughly) how to get to the next tour stop.  A printable map is available -- and essential -- for each tour.    


I love that these are real rangers steeped in the history of the place, and I really love the way they point out the physical features around you.  The ranger at Gettysburg's Peach orchard talks about this peach trees the National Park Service just planted there, and then he directs your eyes to the important Little Round Top hill off in the distance.  If you visited here and only had interpretive signs to read, you would miss so much. 

Civil War buffs will love these podcasts for the specific value they add to each location they cover.  People NOT already into battle history, however, could have a hard time listening to a whole tour (they range from 20 to 60 minutes, though most run about half an hour).  This is because compelling storytelling is not necessarily the strength of rangers and historians.  In the couple of tours I previewed, the tour guides throw a LOT of facts about distances, geography, casualties and regiment numbers at the listener without necessarily couching them in an immersive narrative about how the battle progressed.  But being live and off-the-cuff helps keep the energy up (as opposed to scripted podcasts read in a studio).


The audio production is also only so-so.  They're recorded outdoors on-site, where wind noise is always a problem.  Some of the tour guides also pop a lot of p's as they talk into the microphone.  Both of these things can be hard on listeners after a while, especially when listening in headphones.  The rangers also sometimes gloss right past the instructions for getting to the next location, so the printed map is a must. 

Next week marks the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam (Sept. 17, 1862), and there will be a lot of rangers, historians and other interpreters on the battlefield.  There's no substitute for that kind of personal contact.  But if you have to walk the hallowed ground on your own, these are some of the most effective place-centered audio tours I have found yet.  

(Photos from National Park Service)

Today from Twitter: trying again

Searching "audio tour" on Twitter today reveals these gems:

• A couple of commercial audio tour producers are advertising their product on Twitter today. One company, UK-based HeartBeat Guides, sells mp3 audio guides of popular tourist cities all over the world. Their product is clearly aimed at tourists and a typical download appears to be around $10. From the site: "HeartBeatguides are a magical mix of atmosphere and vital information for the visitor." The samples offered do appear to have excellent audio production (which, strangely, seems to be a rare in commercial audio tours), full of ambient sound. But I can't tell how well the mp3s actually guide visitors through the city. It appears to present guide-book style general information in audio form without embracing a particular place. So maybe it's better for pre-travel listening or listening to on a bus or in the hotel before a day of adventure. But it's very hard to tell these things from a sample. (via iPod_Travel)
• The other self-tweeting company is called Visual Travel Tours. It also sells tours of spots around the globe, but they are much more multi-media. Customers can download printable text and photos, or audio/video guides to run on your iPhone -- then there's the happy medium which includes text and video, but no audio. The samples indicate the audio production here is more rudimentary with a single narrator reading a script. But the information presented seems to be more directly tied to place, and I think this has to do with the writer. VTT gets experts on a given place to write the scripts, so there is a more personal touch. I want to talk more with the creators about this very interesting placecasting model. (via VTravelTours)
• For the second time in a row, my Twitter search has brought up a mention of Civil War audio tours. In both cases, the tours referenced were by CivilWarTraveler.com, I'm a Civil War buff myself, and I would have LOVED to have placecasts of the battlefields I visited back in high school. These are very good and I'll write more about them tomorrow.
• People have been taking audio tours of Prestongrange since 2004. What is Prestongrange? "Prestongrange is a site of major importance in the story of Scotland's Industrial Revolution." The tour includes stops at a brickworks, a kiln and a cornish beam engine. What is a cornish beam engine? Look it up. The audio tour seems pretty important to the site, given how promanently it's featured on the Prestongrange Web site. The narrator is John Bellany, "one of Scotland's most noted living artists, who was born in nearby Port Seton." So next time we're in Scottland, let's use the digital revolution to help us better understand the industrial one. (via deb_max)
• Finally, it looks like today, 9/10, is the day for audio touring in Istanbul. A creative group called C-U-M-A (which also appears to organize flash mobs, among other pursuits) is handing out MP3 players so people can tour the city at certain times today. The audio tour doesn't seem to be available for download, but it sounds interesting. It "intends to frame Istanbul not just from an artist's point of view but through the insights and voices of designers, urban planners and artisans. Wish I could be there. (via evrenuzervb)

And that's it for today's Twitter hits. I'll try again in a few days. Happy touring. And I'm always looking for more tour recommendations.