This is the second article in a series on music museum integration. Check out Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s $1.5M Tech Upgrade.

The Grammy Museum, located in downtown Los Angeles’ s L.A. Live venue, opened in December 2008 and synchronized to the Grammy Awards’ 50th anniversary celebration. The 30,000-square-foot museum consists of three floors of exhibits, designed by Gallagher and Associates, featuring historical art and technology music artifacts, recordings of behind-the-scenes Grammy live performances, and interactive touch-screen sensitive booths.

Showcasing Sound

The 200-seat Clive Davis Theater augments three floors of exhibits. Systems designer and integrator Design & Production packed five D-vision 30-1080P-XC; six D-Vision 30-SX-XB; four I-Vision 20SX-XB; a Titan 1080P-600 Digital Projection projector; 13 Elographics touch screens, 20 Electrograph Revolution HD 42 inch, and 10 Electrograph Revolution 46 inch LCD displays; 28 Adtech Edge 4111 HD video servers and 22 Eletech EM3038AX audio servers into the 21 interactive exhibits.

One of those is Crossroads, an 18-foot interactive table that carries visitors through the musical landscape. The table is made touch-sensitive by using a projected capacitive field generated by a thin Mylar foil under the table’ s surface. Images are projected onto a Frit Fired white glass tabletop from four Digital Projection iVision 20SX projectors. Each projector is fed two computer-generated images that are windowed with an RGB Spectrum DualView processor (to reduce the quantity of projectors, and thus, the heat in the overhead projector compartment) and aligned pixel by pixel to match the capacitive touch areas on the glass surface. Shadows from visitors’ hands help navigate menus and touch points.

Check Out Photos of the Grammy Museum

“Music museums put a huge premium on sound and on the sophistication of all the A/V systems,” says Sue Lepp, senior vice president of Design & Production, which also did the original systems installations at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the Ralph Stanley Museum in Clintwood, Va.

From MP3 to .WAV

Dale Panning, senior systems engineer at Design & Production, says that after years of telephone-like limited bandwidth audio used in exhibits, MP3 audio created an impact in installation circles over a decade ago, boosted by the proliferation of file-based audio players that museums (and docents, tired of repeating themselves) embraced.

Music museums, like the music industry, also liked MP3’ s convenience; however, before long the format’ s compressed nature became more of a bummer than a buzz compared to the full-range 44.1-kHz/16-bit compact disc. Music museums were a factor in the growth of. wav-file-based audio players and the inclusion of full-range speakers to more accurately reproduce music’ s broader bandwidth.

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