This is a transcription of the Audio Description episode of the Sensational Shorts podcast, produced and recorded by The Sensational Museum team members, Dr Alison Eardley and Dr Charlotte Slark
Audio
Speaker descriptions
Alison speaks authoritatively and enthusiastically. She has a north London accent and speeds up when she’s excited. While her voice is not particularly high pitched, it is a much lower octave in her head than in reality.
Charlotte speaks animatedly and talks faster when she’s excited. She has a southern English accent, which a local person would identify as a somewhat polished combination of Slough and Staines upon Thames (think quite hard consonants!). It’s the accent of someone from a working-class background who has spent a lot of time having to fit-in in middle class spaces.
Notes on transcript style
- Punctuation is used to indicate the way the content was delivered, rather than necessarily being how should be correct grammatically. Please try and read it with these pauses (or not as the case may be) in mind.
- Words in square brackets and in italics, [like this], indicate delivery types (e.g. softly; animated), audible occurrences (e.g. laugh; sigh), and sound differences (e.g. quieter delivery) in the recording.
- Ellipses (like… this) indicate a short break between sentences.
- Italicised words (like this) indicate emphasis placed more heavily on the words as they are delivered.
- Quotation marks (“like this”) mean we are suggesting this is something someone might have said (e.g., she said, “oh, that was weird”, and I could see why)
- Whereas quotation marks (‘like this’) mean we are emphasising it as a useful term (e.g. ‘the fourth wall’).
Transcript
[The podcast starts with The Sensational Museum audio logo: A conspiratorial female voice says ‘The Sensational Museum’. Lower in volume, almost distant, people are chattering excitedly in a large, echoey space. A warm, major chord chimes and fades out]
Charlotte 00:00
Hello and welcome to this Sensational Short Podcast on Audio Description. I’m Charlotte Slark
Alison 00:06
And I’m Alison Eardley.
Charlotte 00:08
We always start with visual descriptions. So, Alison, would you like to go first?
Alison 00:12
So I am a white woman, Generation X. I have long blonde hair, which is normally tied back, and it is today. I wear glasses, and it happens to be a really hot day outside, so I’m wearing a summer dress,
Charlotte 00:27
Excellent. I’m also a white woman in my 30s with blonde curly hair that’s tied up in a bun. I’ve got dark purple plastic glasses on, and I’m wearing a slightly Matisse-inspired t shirt.
At the Sensational Museum we’re always talking about how no one sense is necessary or sufficient. We often talk about the fact that we need to question the default of visual in museums, but it’s important to note, that we don’t mean that things shouldn’t be visual. Instead, there should be alternative ways to engage that given equal or better experience than the visual one. So Alison, can you tell me why is audio description crucial for multisensory engagement in museums?
Alison 01:06
So there’s instances when we’re thinking about what an exhibition is, or what an exhibit is, and, the most obvious one that comes to mind is 2D artworks in a museum where, it’s assumed that vision is absolutely crucial to the experience that people are having. And if you’re looking to interpret something like a 2D artwork in multisensory ways, you might be able to do that, but at the same time, it’s probably not going to be possible to get all of the same information that you would get from the artwork just through adding sound or smell or scent or things like that. And so in these instances, something like audio description becomes absolutely crucial. Traditional AD has been described as a visual to verbal translation, which, I hate and I’ll get back to that in a minute, It’s also often considered to be an objective description. It will be generally produced after an exhibition has been completed and laid out, someone will come in and do that description. It’s offered to people who are blind or partially blind, and can be either live or through a recorded headset. And it also often starts with the background information first. So the first thing that will be given will be the tombstone information. And, the kind of core principle is that people will aim to be “neutral” [you can very much hear the air quotes here!]. The other thing that’s really important is that it’s delivered, almost always by somebody who is cited for somebody who’s blind and partially blind, and so that’s kind of what traditional AD is. But, when we’re thinking about audio description within the context of the Sensational Museum, what we really wanted to talk to you about is how that can be done differently, how this idea of traditional audio description is changing, and how that fits into the notion of what we’re thinking about in terms of inclusive design within a museum context.
Charlotte 02:58
So typically, audio description is for blind or partially blind audiences. Who else can it benefit?
Alison 03:04
So we’ve been doing some research in a project, which is the Workshop for Inclusive Co-created Audio Description, shortened as WICAD [pronounced “wicked”]. We’ve been challenging the core assumptions about what audio description is, who it’s for, and how it’s created so if you start with that question about who it’s for, It’s, as I said, considered to be for blind people or partially blind people, because the assumption has always been that if you’re sighted, you walk into a museum, and you have this [sarcastically] ‘amazing capacity’ to just access everything through that sense of vision. And what that means is that, you know, basically, we assume that when someone sighted walks into a museum or a gallery, all they need to do is to look, and that gives them access to everything. It gives them access to the perceptual experience. It gives them access to the conceptual experience, and it gives them access to the emotional experience, of whatever museum they’re in and whatever the contents is. So we tend to assume that vision is this magical sense, or this magical ability that gives us access to all of this information, and actually, without necessarily having to put that much effort into it. However the reality is, that when people walk into a museum, people will spend on average 20 seconds experiencing an artwork in an art museum. And 20 seconds is nothing at all. You’re a museum professional, and you’ve spent years putting together this amazing exhibition with wonderful information and wonderful artifacts, for someone to spend 20 minutes flit around 20 seconds on one thing, and then they go, they’re not going to remember it. Whereas what audio description does is it provides an opportunity for guiding attention. So for sighted people, we’ve called this “guided looking”, because the reality is that people don’t know how to use their attention, they don’t know how to use their eyes, because we’re not used to doing it. What we normally do is we pass through the world, we take the information we need for the task that we’re doing and we move on literally and metaphorically. Whereas in a museum or gallery context, what we’re being required to do is to focus our attention and use that to unpick visual details. It’s just not something we find easy to do. And, I said in the beginning, I hate the idea of it being visual description and the reason why I don’t like AD as ‘visual description’, because audio description is also a way of describing tactile sensations, it’s a way of describing sound, it’s a way of describing smell, and in all of those descriptions, what it does is, it focuses people’s attention in a way that they find hard to do on their own.
Charlotte 05:38
So actually, audio description is a really good example, then, of disability gain. Because it can be beneficial for all museum audiences, particularly those who may not feel comfortable in space or may not feel like they know how to move about in that space or engage particularly with things like fine art. We’ve talked a lot about “traditional” audio description. What can you tell me about creative audio description?
Alison 06:04
So I’ve talked about traditional audio description and the fact that it tends to be based on this aim of neutrality and this aim of a kind of objectivity. But one of the things the research from Psychology and Neuroscience tells us is that, our perceptual systems are anything but objective. So if you think about that image of the dress that went around the internet a number of years ago that was golden white, or it was blue and cream, or black and grey, goodness knows what other colours people were coming up with, that dress and those debates are absolutely key to the fact that our perceptual systems are actually quite different. It’s not just colour, it’s other things, other types of ways that we perceive, where there’s individual differences in the way that we perceive those. So with all that in mind, when we think about audio description, if the experience that we’re describing is subjective, then we should embrace that subjectivity. We should include that subjectivity into what we’re describing. And the other really important thing, I would say, is that traditionally, people have assumed that what they’re describing is almost the lines, the shapes, you know, the colours, the forms of whatever it is in front of them. However, what museums are aiming to do through narrative, through other means, is they’re aiming to create an experience. They’re aiming to actually have people experiencing something more. So it’s not just about what we’re perceiving. It’s about how we’re experiencing it. So when you look at the Mona Lisa, if you’ve got vision and you’re able to perceive it, the whole point of Mona Lisa, [as an aside] at least in my understanding, and I’m not an art person, so excuse me if I’m wrong, [back to normal now] but the whole point is, What is that expression? What is she thinking? What does her expression, what does that make you feel? Is she happy? Is she sad? It’s just about having those discussions and those explorations about what that expression is and what that means, and what that tells us and who she was. [passionately] None of that is about the lines, etc. You could say “her mouth is slightly upturned and slightly downturned”, but in real terms, that doesn’t communicate it. It’s about what that feeling that people get from experiencing something in a museum. [swallows] And so creative ad is about embracing that. It’s about embracing that within the description, It’s about including that subjectivity. It’s not about making decisions and saying, “Well, I think she’s smiling. I’m going to say that. I’m going to say it’s a slightly upturned smile.” It’s about saying “it could be this, [doing a higher voice] it could be the upturned smile, it could be a frown.” It could be, she’s thinking about her shopping list. It could be all manner of whatever things that she’s thinking but it’s about including some of those reflections into the audio description. Audio description is hard to do, whether you’re describing sound, touch, vision, unless you’re practiced at it, it’s really hard to describe because the things that we’ve been asked to pay attention to are things that we process almost on an implicit level. So it’s really hard to suddenly, know how to describe to find the language and the words that you want to use to describe something. In the WICAD project, what we did was we got our free people blind, partially blind and sighted. They described through conversation. So they had a conversation. They didn’t do what is standardly description, which is a written, formal kind of description. They talk to each other, and it’s amazing how if you put three people together and, as individuals they’re probably going to struggle, but put them together, they’ll ask questions, they’ll explore. They start building up this really incredible description, this really rich description, which basically is really hard to do on your own if you have no experience. The key point really is that when you think about audio description, don’t think of it as just an access tool. Don’t think of it as ‘just something that people who are blind or partially blind need’. Don’t think of it as something that has to be functional and is describing the visual information to somebody who doesn’t have information. Think of it as a way of inclusive interpretation, of enriching what the experience is by guiding people’s attention, people’s sensory attention. Use multisensory description. Imagine what that experience is. Think about what that experience is for you, for somebody else, and include all of that subjective information into a description. And what you end up with is something which can, [as an aside] we hope we think, enhance the experience of everybody
Charlotte 10:27
Exactly. And this fits into one of the really core messages of what we’re doing with the Sensational Museum, which is about making sure that you communicate the image, the object, the artwork, the experience, rather than just what something looks like. Audio description is just another way, that we can use multisensory engagement to make the museum experience better for everyone. I’ve been Charlotte Slark
Alison 10:50
And I’ve been Alison Eardley.
Charlotte 10:53
Thank you for listening to this Sensational Short Podcast on Audio Description.
[The podcast ends with The Sensational Museum audio logo. A conspiratorial female voice says ‘The Sensational Museum’. Lower in volume, almost distant, people are chattering excitedly in a large, echoey space. A warm, major chord chimes and fades out]