A friend of mine is a sound artist. She creates these sculptures made of natural materials and sound recordings from the areas where the natural materials were collected. The sound is recorded onto a tiny micro-player that is connected to a speaker, the cone of which she makes from collected vegetation. The viewer presses a small button on the wall to play the recording. The sound is not amplified, but it can be heard by leaning towards the work mounted to the wall, whereupon you get a very subtle scent of the grasses and leaves and other things used to create the piece. Very nice, very subtle work.

Recently galleries have requested the pieces be more accessible to viewers who are hearing impaired. The recordings are just too subtle for anyone for an impairment to discern much of anything. And some galleries receive public money for operating expenses, and accessibility is a requirement of that funding. She's tried amplification, but that disrupts the whole intimate aspect of experiencing the work, plus the sounds bleed into each other making the gallery a noisy space counter to her goals for the work. With covid, people don't like putting public-use headphones on, and headphones are expensive and break. And people take them, even in fancy galleries.

She asked me if I knew how museums run their virtual docent technology. These are all mobile phone based. There is a number or a QR code next to a painting that the viewer scans or enters into their phone and listens to the recording of someone talking about the painting. She was hoping that this is some kind of modular local-area cellular or WIFI network in a box with storage that could be loaded with her recordings and set up easily in a gallery. Then the viewer could just scan a QR code with their phone and listen to the corresponding recording while standing in front of each piece.

Does anyone here know anything about these set ups? Are they available in some kind of modular unit that could be set up in a gallery relatively easily? Or are they a cloud-based service? The goal would be to have setup be relatively trouble-free after all the recordings were loaded and set up to correspond to the individual pieces. And to have the connection required not cost money for the viewers of the work. Best I think if it was just local to the gallery - a small box of technology whirring away in an out of the way place.