An immersive journey in the night
What does darkness sound like? For its exhibition In The Night, SAMoCA in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, wanted visitors to feel the night, not just look at it. Together with audio agency Big Orange, we built an audio guide visitors open on their own phone — one scan, no app, and the exhibition closes in around them.
What we provided
An exhibition about the night
In The Night brought together work from around thirty artists, all circling a single subject: darkness. Dreamscapes, shadow, stillness, the tension between what you can and can't see. SAMoCA asked Big Orange to give the exhibition an audio layer to match, and Big Orange brought in Tapart to build the guide that would carry it.
A virtual audio landscape that moves with you
The exhibition is split into four zones — How distant we are?, Abundant Nights, Dreams, and Night Energy — and each has its own ambient soundtrack in the guide. As visitors move through the exhibition, the audio loops and crossfades from one zone into the next, so the soundscape shifts along with them and never breaks. It's a virtual audio landscape that follows their path, keeping them inside the world of the night from the first room to the last.
Immersive ambient audio
Ambient audio tracks for each of the four zones in the exhibition continuously play in the background during the tour. The audio seamlessly loops and crossfades between the four zones, immersing visitors in a beautiful sound experience.
Narratives
At key artworks in the exhibition, visitors can listen to narratives. These narratives include sound designs that blend seamlessly with the ambient soundtrack in the background for a truly immersive experience.
Stories at key works
At key works, visitors can stop and listen to a story. Each one is layered with sound design that blends into the ambient track around it, so the narration feels like part of the room rather than a voice over the top of it. The link between what you hear and what you see grows tighter the longer you stay.
A calmer way through
Being immersed in a full soundscape isn't for everyone — some visitors are more sensitive to sound and stimulation. For them, there's a low sensory version of the guide. It drops the ambient audio and sound design and keeps the same stories in a calm, voice-only form — the same exhibition, at a gentler volume.
Built for Arabic, not just translated
The guide is fully available in Arabic, and that means more than swapping the words. Arabic reads right to left, so the whole interface flips with it — text, navigation, and layout all follow the reading direction. Arabic and English visitors each get an experience that feels made for them.
On your own phone, or one of the museum
Visitors open the guide by scanning a QR code. It runs straight in the browser as a web app, so there's nothing to download or install. For anyone without a phone, the museum keeps sixty handheld devices ready to borrow — which we prepared and configured together with Tonwelt and Big Orange to run the exact same experience. The guide was built with Tapart's Mediaguide platform, which let us shape a high-quality experience for SAMoCA without starting from scratch.
"Working with Tapart was a bliss, and by using their state-of-the-art app, we've delivered one of our finest audio experiences to date."
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