I’ve always loved visiting museums as a kid for the sheer experience of being transported to a different era. It is like a secret time travel portal to people who can see it and a boring building with ancient stuff to people who can’t. So, choosing the topic for the podcast wasn’t difficult, and I had so much fun scripting it.
I wanted to portray both sadness of losing so many museums due to budget cuts, and the amazement of how many museums shall survive bringing new experiences for visitors. As I read further about the use of digital technologies in museums, I realized many museums have been doing that even before covid. However, covid pushed more museums to be open to digitalization to survive. The statistics I found from multiple scholarly sources varied slightly, but all predicted the closure of more museums. It seems like it is the beginning of a new era for museums and how we, as visitors experience the culture.
I intentionally titled the podcast ‘Magical history houses closing forever?’ to signify the closure of many museums all over the world. However, as the podcast progressed the future of the museum doesn’t seem that bleak. In fact, the museums of the future promise to be much more immersive, taking us on almost real-like time travel journeys.
The problem arose while I was recording, starting with the fact that I hate my recorded voice. Telling myself that I gotta get used to it, especially if I want a career in media, I finally recorded the podcast. I made several mistakes as I read out the script, but didn’t bother about re-starting the entire script hoping to edit out the mistakes later. That was not a great decision on my part, as I am not accustomed to using Audacity, and editing every single flaw became very tedious.
So, I came up with plan B. To read the script in six different parts, and re-start every time I made a mistake. This allowed me to take breaks between each recording to read what I had to say next. Also, every time I made a mistake, I could restart as I didn’t have to start from the beginning. This worked so much better than the first time I tried to edit.
I used piano music from free sound for the intro and outro music. However, for the picture, I used a photo I clicked a few years back when I was living in India.