{"id":7201,"date":"2026-11-03T12:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T17:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thevoicerealm.com\/blog\/?p=7201"},"modified":"2026-11-03T12:05:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T17:05:00","slug":"museum-audio-guide-narration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thevoicerealm.com\/blog\/museum-audio-guide-narration\/","title":{"rendered":"Press 14 to Begin: How to Narrate a Museum Audio Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

This one’s for voice actors who’ve been asked to narrate a museum audio guide, or who’d like to be. It’s a quiet corner of narration work, and it’s a lovely one: galleries, history museums, heritage houses, zoos, botanic gardens, castles and city walking tours all need someone to talk in a visitor’s ear for an hour.<\/p>\n

It looks like ordinary narration on the page. It isn’t, quite. Your listener is on their feet, in a room full of strangers, holding a handset or a phone, and they’re looking at something that isn’t you. Everything about the read follows from that.<\/p>\n

The visitor is looking at something else<\/h2>\n

In most narration work, your voice is the main event. In a commercial it’s selling, in an audiobook it’s the whole show. In a museum, the painting or the fossil or the old ship’s bell is the main event, and you’re the friend who leans in and says “look at this bit”.<\/p>\n

The staff at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhet\u016b in New Zealand put it plainly when they rebuilt their audio guide. Gallery librarian and archivist Tim Jones told the gallery’s blog: “We don’t want the audio to detract from people looking at the art.”<\/p>\n

For a narrator, that means a few things. You leave space for eyes to move. When the script says “in the bottom left corner, a small dog is asleep under the table”, the listener has to find that dog, so give them a beat after it. You keep your energy friendly but low enough that it doesn’t compete with the room. And you never sound like you’re performing at them, because they can’t see you and they didn’t come for you.<\/p>\n

It also means the room is part of your mix. Galleries echo, other visitors chat, a school group passes through. A read that sits a touch forward, with clean consonants and no mumbled endings, survives a noisy room far better than a breathy, intimate one.<\/p>\n

Short beats long, and every stop needs a story<\/h2>\n

When the Christchurch team planned their new guide, they set themselves rules of thumb, including that “audio beats video and short beats long”. They added a second one that’s worth pinning above any narrator’s desk: “every audio must tell a story”.<\/p>\n

Writers and curators own the script, so you won’t usually decide how long a stop runs. But you can make a short stop feel complete. Good stops have a shape you can hear, like the one pictured in this section, and your read should follow it. Lift slightly as the story starts, settle when the script sends the listener back to the object, then finish without a big ending, because the visitor is about to press another number.<\/p>\n

Watch the openings in particular. Visitors often jump straight in partway through a tour, so each stop has to work as a first impression. Treat the first line of every stop like the first line of the whole guide: warm, clear, unhurried, with no assumption that they heard the stop before.<\/p>\n

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Talk to one person standing next to you<\/h2>\n

The register you’re after is a well informed friend at the listener’s shoulder. Not a lecturer, not an announcer, and not a hushed library whisper.<\/p>\n

Mel Buchanan, then an assistant curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, wrote about recording an exhibition tour in a local sound studio. “We want the audio tour to be conversational and spontaneous, as if Glenn and I are there in the gallery speaking together with each visitor,” she wrote. If you’ve ever worked on a read that has to sound unscripted<\/a>, the same skills apply here.<\/p>\n

She also shared a trick every audio guide narrator should steal. “To help me remember to address the objects in the gallery, when I was in fact in a studio, I always had a large picture in front of me.” Ask the client for an image of every object on the tour, print them or put them on a second screen, and look at each one while you read its stop. Your eyes go where the visitor’s eyes go, and it comes through in the timing. You’ll pause where there’s detail to find, and you’ll hear yourself describing a real thing rather than reading a paragraph.<\/p>\n

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Your script is also the printed transcript<\/h2>\n

Here’s a detail many narrators never think about. Museums that take accessibility seriously publish the words of their audio for visitors who are deaf or hard of hearing. The Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design are direct about it: “Provide all audio narration in a print format.”<\/p>\n

That changes how much freedom you have. In a commercial, a small ad lib that makes a line land is often welcome. In an audio guide, the transcript on the wall or in the app has to match what people hear, so read it word for word unless the producer says otherwise. If a line doesn’t sit right in your mouth, flag it and suggest a fix, and let them update both versions. Don’t fix it quietly on the take.<\/p>\n

Ask for these before you record<\/span><\/p>\n
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  1. A picture of every object.<\/strong> One per stop, labelled with the stop number, so you can look while you read.<\/li>\n
  2. The tour order.<\/strong> Which stops come first, which are optional extras, and which are for families.<\/li>\n
  3. A name list with sounds.<\/strong> Artists, places and makers, with the curator’s preferred pronunciation, recorded if possible.<\/li>\n
  4. Every small line.<\/strong> Welcome, help prompts, the end of tour message and any “press” instructions, in one list.<\/li>\n
  5. File names and specs.<\/strong> How each stop should be named and delivered, before the first take.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n

    Names are where audio guides go wrong most often. A gallery visitor might hear a painter’s name once on your recording and then repeat it to friends for years. Curators usually know exactly how a name should be said, so ask, and do your own homework too: our guide to getting a tricky name right<\/a> walks through where to check.<\/p>\n

    Describing what some listeners can’t see<\/h2>\n

    Many museums now offer descriptive tours for blind and low vision visitors, and narrators are often hired for them. These ask more of you than a standard stop. The Smithsonian guidelines describe the job of audio description like this: “Audiodescription fills in what persons with low vision may not be able to see completely; it provides details and compares new objects to familiar ones for people who are blind.”<\/p>\n

    That last part, comparing new objects to familiar ones, is the heart of it, and you’ll hear it in good descriptive scripts. In a descriptive tour of the exhibition The Senses at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, curator Ellen Lupton sets the scene like this: “Imagine a big shoe box marked into three long zones: one in the middle, and two on either side.”<\/p>\n

    As the narrator, your job is to make that kind of picture easy to build. Slow down a little for spatial language. Give directions room: “on your left”, “about waist height”, “ten steps ahead” need clear stress, because someone is moving their body on what you say. Keep descriptive words plain and steady rather than dramatic, and let the listener decide how they feel about what’s there. If this side of the work interests you, our piece on audio description narration<\/a> covers the wider field.<\/p>\n

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    The little lines nobody thinks about<\/h2>\n

    Every audio guide has a layer of small recordings around the main stops: a welcome, how to use the device, “press the green button to hear more”, a gentle reminder to keep the volume low, a goodbye at the exit, sometimes a line for a gift shop or cafe.<\/p>\n

    Mel Buchanan noticed this side of it too. After several hours in the studio, she wrote, the team had their main content “but also additional content like ‘To hear more, press play now.'”<\/p>\n

    Every visitor hears these lines, often more than once, so read them as carefully as the stops. A few habits help:<\/p>\n