Case study: 9/11 Museum We Remember exhibit

Female 1: Said. Oh my God. That plane has just crashed. Male 1: World Trade Center. Female 2: Try to frantically get to a radio. Male 1: When I head it over the radio. Male 2: I heard it on the radio. Male 3: A lot of what we do, and we're known for, are these pieces that are large scale environmental pieces. There's multiple projectors, multiple monitors. It's a piece that you sometimes will move through. There's not necessarily one set place where you should be standing and viewing and in your seat. It's something where you, as a visitor, are much more active participant in how you are absorbing this material. The We Remember exhibit is effectively the very first exhibit that visitors will experience as they enter into the museum. The largest exhibit by far in the museum, it's about a 100 feet in terms of the actual exhibit space. It is six projectors, it is sixteen speakers and it is a piece where, it looks at the way that the entire world first learned and experienced that this event was happening. And what we did was we have what's called the 9/11 preview site, which we set up about four years ago, right next to the world trade center site, and we have a recording booth. Where people can go in, they enter in their name, where they're from, and then they have three minutes to record their 9/11 story. We recorded well over I believe, eight or ten thousand recordings. It's still going on. When you're trying to sort of encompass eight thousand stories. It's not about oh, I want to say this, I want it to be about this. What you need to do is listen and just listen and just listen and you find all of these sort of similarities and that's what you use to sort of create your story. Female 3: There was a, a caption on the bottom of the screen. Female 4: We were watching it in real time. Female 5: We actually saw it live. Male 2: So, here in Sountrack Pro, we actually have the ability to really lay out all, roughly 16 different layers. But what happens is if you try to listen to the same thing in a, a stereo environment, it just sounds like absolute chaos Male 3: On the day of September 11th, 2009. Female 6: On September 11th. Male 2: We can specify, that, a given track, is going to be played on a specific speaker in this space. And you know, we didn't really know going in what we were going to do exactly with the audio. We knew we had all these speakers in this environment so we had to go to this hanger in Buffalo in the middle of January and actually really edit the piece effectively in that 100 feet of physical space. So rather than this simple sort of you know, this audio is going to play out of your left speaker or your right speaker. It can be from 30 feet behind you, 80 feet in front of you. And wherever you are standing you are going to have a very different experience of this piece. It is six 14 foot panels and overhead you can see there are speakers which sort have stretch throughout the space. You can be surrounded 360 degrees by all of these different stories so that rather than it sounding like chaos you actually can make out that someone is in Sao Paulo, Brazil, someone is Honolulu, Hawaii, someone is in Beijing. This is an incredibly important exhibit. This is the first exhibit that everyone, 100% of visitors, are going to experience. This had to work. And there's really no way to prove that it was going to work without mocking it up at full scale. And it's incredible how much you learn. You know, we didn't know going in that we actually wanted to have different tracks on different speakers. We also didn't really understand the ability that we had to really make this environmental what we got is something that I think is just going to be this incredibly unique experience. Its just, it's not something that you can experience sort of sitting in one location. It's a really active exhibit and it really accomplishes everything that we set out.