Soundscape of an Archaeological Site Recreated with Audio Augmented Reality

This article investigates the use of an audio augmented reality (AAR) system to recreate the soundscape of a medieval archaeological site. The aim of our work was to explore whether it is possible to enhance a tourist's archaeological experience, which is often derived from only scarce remains. We developed a smartphone-based AAR system, which uses location and orientation sensors to synthesize the soundscape of a site and plays it to the user via headphones. We recreated the ancient soundscape of a medieval archaeological site in Croatia and tested it in situ on two groups of participants using the soundwalk method. One test group performed the soundwalk while listening to the recreated soundscape using the AAR system, while the second control group did not use the AAR equipment. We measured the experiences of the participants using two methods: the standard soundwalk questionnaire and affective computing equipment for detecting the emotional state of participants. The results of both test methods show that participants who were listening to the ancient soundscape using our AAR system experienced higher arousal than those visiting the site without AAR.