Abstract
With the development of modern technologies, museums have been engaged in the competition for novel sensory resources. Taking into consideration the main body of visitors, their experiential representation has gradually become the focal point of the museums. However, at present, the museum display is limited to visual effect. The scientific and technological methods proposed by existing research have not really formed a deep cultural memory of historical stories, and the sustainable development paths of museums need to be further optimized. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore the conception and path of museum auditory experience development, and to verify the existing patterns of empathy in museum auditory experience development. We set up digital music vocalization tools in the museum to temporarily create the immersion experience for digital music. In this scenario, we could meticulously observe the tourists’ experience, with the joint effect of active cognitive environment and environment-driven emotion. We also conducted a timely survey on the cognition, emotion, and experience of the observation subjects after the experiment. Last, empirical methods has been used to analyze the role of immersive empathy in enhancing visitors’ experience, in order to gain insights into visitors’ perception and cognition of the museum, integrating with the digital music. After analyzing the collected data, this study found that cognitive empathy has a significant positive impact on visitors’ experience. It indicated that for the historical stories presentation, the properly integration of museum and digital can help tourists deeply understand the historical events, which could restore the cultural connotation conveyed by the designer. Emotional empathy also has a significant positive impact on visitors’ experience. It showed that that the rendering of digital music will motivate visitors’ emotional fluctuation, during their visit to the museum. And through the combination of audio-visual effects, the constructed spatial perception, allowing visitors to enjoy immersive experience. This study proposed a vision for the development of auditory experiences in museums, based on both cognitively active immersion and emotionally passive immersion of visitors. We also suggested that in the new era, museums need to reform with voice, to timely adjust and innovate their way to exhibit cultural relics, with the hierarchical design of audiovisual integration to construct a more appealing scene and atmosphere.
Plain Language Summary
After analyzing the collected data, this study found that cognitive empathy has a significant positive impact on visitors’ experience. It indicated that for the historical stories presentation, the properly integration of museum and digital can help tourists deeply understand the historical events, which could restore the cultural connotation conveyed by the designer. Emotional empathy also has a significant positive impact on visitors’ experience. It showed that that the rendering of digital music will motivate visitors’ emotional fluctuation, during their visit to the museum. And through the combination of audio-visual effects, the constructed spatial perception, allowing visitors to enjoy immersive experience. This study proposed a vision for the development of auditory experiences in museums, based on both cognitively active immersion and emotionally passive immersion of visitors. We also suggested that in the new era, museums need to reform with voice, to timely adjust and innovate their way to exhibit cultural relics, with the hierarchical design of audiovisual integration to construct a more appealing scene and atmosphere.
Introduction
Museums are non-profit, permanent institutions to serve the society and its development. It opens to the public, to provide education and enjoyment, which promotes the awareness, conservation, research, and exhibition of both tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment. They are important links between the past, present, and future (Sharif-Askari & Abu-Hijleh, 2018). With the continuous development of museums, there has been an upward tendency to employ museums for social education. Playing an important role in carrying culture, museums combine historical stories and artifacts, which could vigorously promote traditional culture, inheriting and sustaining the cultural deposits (J. Li et al., 2023). However, cultural education based on museum exhibitions of artifacts is different from general cultural education. It belongs to the category of implicit education, which usually achieves the objectives of cultural education in a subtle way (Nicolaisen & Achiam, 2020). Generally speaking, although nowadays visitors are willing to enter museums on their own initiative, the monotonous contents and the limited visual effect of field-based displays can only satisfy their low-level needs. It is insufficient to motivate visitors to form intrinsic spiritual impetus, resulting in a one-sided interpretation of culture, and making it difficult for visitors to form enduring cultural memories, therefore they are not interested in re-entering museums (Pietroni, 2019). It is obvious that the crux of the problem is “how to make the historical events that in visitors’ memories to be vivid and perceivable.”
Based on the literature review, it has been found that most scholars have noticed the importance of museums as a medium for social education (Höttecke & Allchin, 2020). They also proposed that in an era with the rapidly developing Internet, the virtual reality technology in museums, together with the technological elements, through the virtualized exhibitions, digitized information resources, and diversified presentation, can greatly awake visitors’ interest in museums and enhance their experience (Carvajal et al., 2020; Scavarelli et al., 2021). However, sophisticated technological tools can only create a fleeting experience for visitors, without allowing historical stories to leave enduring cultural memories to realize the inheritance. Therefore, based on the empathy theory, this study further explored the impact of cognitive empathy and affective empathy on visitors’ experience, under the improved auditory experience in museums, and proposed ideas and sustainable paths for its development.
Sensory experience could always be the fundamental element of environmental coexistence (X. Li & Katsumata, 2020). The combination of auditory and visual senses, innovative concepts, technological means, and aesthetic interests can give additional auditory enjoyment of stereo surround, to the monotonous spatial exhibition and the static surface (Wallmark et al., 2018), thus enhancing visitors’ in-depth understanding of the displayed content of the museum and generating empathy with that history and culture. From the perspective of neuroscience, human emotions could be triggered by intuitive processing of various internal and external stimuli. Such as the digital music, it is in charge of the brain mechanism, which is capable of expressing and evoking human emotions, has advantages over static photos and simple narrations (Buchma-Bernatska et al., 2021). Also, different types of digital music in the same environment have different effects on the same group of their helpful behavior (Christensen & Radford, 2018). Therefore, this study argued that designers can mobilize the visitors’ multiple sensory experience, such as 3D spatial displays for the visual sense, stereo surround digital music for the auditory sense, and advanced quality perceptions for the tactile sense, to isolate the external noises. When visitors can actually feel the historical events depicted in the exhibition, creating immersive empathy, regaining that faith in history and culture, arousing deep-rooted enthusiasm, and endowing the new connotations to the culture.
In order to explore the impact of immersive empathy in the of museum auditory experience development on visitors’ experience, this study firstly constructed a theoretical model of cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and visitors’ experience based on the relevant theories of immersive experience and empathy; secondly, this study conducted a pre-survey to select 10 college students as interview subjects, to explore the intuitive feelings that the museum brings in their minds, and their feelings after experiencing the integrated digital music. And the corresponding questionnaire items were designed by combining the mature scales related to each variable, based on the results of the interviews; thirdly, 70 participants are placed in a specific small museum to carry out a formal trial. A certain immersive experience has been temporarily created by setting up the digital music sound generating tool in the museum space. At the end of the experiment, corresponding questionnaires were distributed to measure the cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and auditory experience of each participant; Lastly, 61 valid questionnaires have been collected, with the PLS-SEM method to be employed to conduct a small-sample empirical study, which resulted in the paths of the impact of cognitive empathy and affective empathy on visitors’ experience.
The study aimed to explore immersive empathy in digital music, from the perspective of cognitive empathy and affective empathy, to construct an auditory experience development pathway. It indicated that cognitive active immersion and affective passive immersion are both important factors in the museum experience. The necessity of establishing a relationship between digital technology and the psychology of the visitor has been emphasized, in order to validate the existing pattern of empathy in the museum auditory experience development. At the same time, this study combined the three parts of immersive experience, “engagement—engrossment—total immersion” (Martirosov et al., 2022), to provide practical guidance for museums on how to create a sense of space and a sense of story with digital music. For example the historical story of the museum should be effectively combined with different digital background music, so that visitors can initially experience the combination of auditory and visual sensations; the communication between the narrator and the digital media should be emphasized, to construct a certain spatial and temporal relationship, so that visitors can pay full attention. According to the cultural background of visitors, the digital music should be played to help them internalize the cognitive and emotional resonance, to achieve the full immersion.
Overall, the study achieved the following three goals. First, we constructed a theoretical model diagram for the museums auditory experience development with digital music, based on the empathy theory, and broadened the thinking of academic community about the connection, between digital technology and the psychology of visitors. Second, we identified visitors’ intuitive feelings toward museums, before and after experiencing the cooperation with digital music, and designed the measurement question items for the auditory experience in museums. Third, we discussed the relationship between visitors’ empathy and the digital music experience and proposed effective paths, which could promote visitors’ immersive empathy to guide the future construction of museums auditory experience development, with the digital music. The structure of this study is as follows. First, it reviews the theoretical frameworks of immersive experience and empathy, as well as explores the possibility of forming immersion and empathy in the museum auditory experience. Second, it introduces the variable measurements, experimental scenarios, and sample selection. Third, it analyzes the paths of cognitive empathy and affective empathy on the visitors’ auditory experience. Lastly, we describe the significance and limitations of this study, future work, and make conclusions.
Literature Review
Immersion Experience and Related Theoretical Frameworks
Immersive experience is a state in which an individual is fully engaged in a particular environment or activity. From the perspective of individual-environment interactions, existing research has highlighted the dimensions of both active cognition (Schnall et al., 2012) and passive environment (Kim et al., 2020) for the immersive experience. Active cognition refers to individuals’ conscious immersion in a special atmosphere that they could set up based on previous perceptions and experiences. Passive environment refers to the situation where the individuals make immersive creation in a certain environment and space, to generate a unique sense of story and space that immerses the visitors unconsciously, with a strong sense of immersion and authenticity. From the perspective of dynamic experiencing process, immersive experience can be further divided into three stages, namely engagement (Hsu & Cheng, 2021), engrossment (X. Li, Wirawan, Li, & Yuan, 2021), and total immersion (Birenboim et al., 2021). Since the new and unfamiliar things are more likely to excite individuals and achieve the best experience (Hsu & Cheng, 2021), it is important to converge the attention on a specific stimulus in a certain area that can bring psychological enjoyment and spiritual satisfaction. In order to maintain this satisfaction, awareness and action should be aligned, to prompt individuals to continuously focus on the current behavior and access a sustained state of immersion. It should be noted that, when the same level of satisfaction lasts for a certain period of time, the individuals’ excitement will gradually decrease and attention will be distracted. At this point, it is necessary to adjust the stimulation level appropriately to maintain the immersion state (Antón et al., 2018).
However, in the field of cultural management and museum research, many studies have showed that museums are more likely to exhibit and restore the historical event with multimedia interaction and virtual technology, which attracts the visitors’ attention on the magic of technology rather than the cultural experience (McIntyre, 2010; Prentice, 2001; Su & Teng, 2018). This problem has been solved in the field of sensory psychology and cognitive science, Sun and Zhong (2020) explored the role of senses in the cognitive process. They pointed out that people are inevitably inseparable from their senses, in receiving specific cultural stimuli in a certain domain. To some extent, humans live is shaped through the senses, and brain serve as medium to perceive and to understand the culture of the outside world. Therefore, in the field of digital humanities and cultural management, some scholars suggested that museums should use immersion to stimulate visitors’ emotional resonance, and meanwhile focusing not only on the breadth of the experience but also on its depth. For example, the employment of multi-level auditory, visual, tactile, and other senses, presents the abstract culture in a more vivid and concrete way, and brings visitors a strong emotional experience (Pietroni, 2021). As technology continues to advance and the emphasis of museums has been placed on visitors’ experience improvement, immersive experience will become more normalized in the design of museums.
Empathy and Related Theoretical Frameworks
Introduced by experimental psychologist, Edward Titchener, and subsequently applied to the field of psychotherapy, empathy has been an important concept in clinical psychology theory and practice (Duan & Hill, 1996). Once proposed, this concept has attracted the attention of scholars in various fields and has been studied extensively. Currently, researchers have defined empathy in terms of individual abilities, psychological processes, and social interactions. First, empathy is the ability to accurately interpret the thoughts and feelings of others (Ickes, 1993). Second, empathy is the mental process by which individuals experience the emotional feelings of others through perception, understanding, and imagination (Schurz et al., 2021; Singer & Lamm, 2009). Third, empathy is state for individuals to experience internal cognitive-emotional feelings from the perspective of others (Boele et al., 2019; Hoffman, 2008).
Regarding the dimensional division of empathy, different scholars have different views, which can be categorized into two types: dual-component (Gladstein, 1983; Yi et al., 2022; Zhao et al., 2023) and multidimensional component (Chen et al., 2023). This study mainly drew on Gladstein’s (1983) binary component theory of empathy, which holds that empathy mainly contains two components: cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy refers to the situation when the individual cognitively adopts another person’s viewpoint and enters another person’s role. Affective empathy is individuals’ response to another person with the same emotion (Decety, 2020; Yi, Li, et al., 2021, Yi, Wang, et al., 2021). The spatial establishment of empathy facilitates visitors from different cultural backgrounds to interpret historical events and artifacts in museums with their own experiences, to find emotional connections in a monotonous exhibition, and to allow communication and transmission to be unnoticeably internalized in the logic of human thoughts of different cultural backgrounds. They generate empathy in the visitors, and their experience will be sustained after the visitors leave the museum (Pedretti & Iannini, 2020). Therefore, with the integrated development of culture and tourism, museums need to further overcome cultural barriers and promote cultural identification, as an essential historical and cultural symbols of cities, which is of vital importance not only for shaping people’s values, but also for transmitting and inheriting culture (Della Lucia & Trunfio, 2018).
Immersion and Empathy in the Auditory Experience of Museums
Museums are important places for people to learn about history, culture, and science. And in museums, the auditory experience is a crucial part that can be elaborated through embodied cognition theory and affective information theory. Embodied cognition theory provides a systematic theoretical framework for the integration of knowledge from two research fields, “body” and “mind,” to explain visitors’ mind-body interactions in the society and the nature, in terms of interdisciplinarity (Wen & Leung, 2021). The key to generating embodied cognition is to enhance visitors’ multichannel perception (Tsai, 2020), which provides theoretical support for the construction of immersive empathy, and emphasizes the contextual experience of visitors in their visit. Affective information theory, on the other hand, focuses on the influence of individuals’ emotions on themselves, and proposes that people (consciously or unconsciously) use their own emotional feelings as a source of information, which in turn affects their judgment and cognitive style (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). Combining the embodied cognition theory and the emotional information theory, this study argued that immersive empathy can be understood as the ability of visitors to deeply integrate into the environment in which they are placed, through the exchange of multi-channel perceptual and emotional information during the visiting, and to experience the emotions associated with the environment, thus establishing an empathic connection. This is not a kind of one-way empathy, but two-way interaction, including both the visitors’ cognitive experience of the environment and the impact of the environment on the visitors’ emotions, forming a two-way emotional communication and understanding. Further exploring the cooperative relationship and influence mechanism between visitors’ cognitive and affective empathy, while their implicit experience under the condition of rendering of contextual elements is of great significance to the development of museums (Pietroni, 2019).
Empathy, the process of humanizing objects, emphasizes spontaneous reactions to the perceived persons and events, which facilitates immersive communication (Fedorchenko et al., 2021). Cognitive science research suggests that mirror neurons in the brain are the basis for understanding other people and building emotional connections with them. The mirror neuron system activates its own imitative sensorimotor system through embodied imitation and evokes its own emotions, resonating with the emotions of others (Sinclair et al., 2017). Humans partially acquire information through the auditory sense. Second only to the visual perceptual path, auditory information is also important for activating the mirror neuron system in the human brain (Reynolds et al., 2019). In real scenario, the sound can effectively indicate abstract objects, trigger changes in the emotional state of a person, and alert possible dangers. While in virtual scenario, the auditory system can provide users with auxiliary information, enhance their auditory perception, compensate for the lack of visual effects, enhance the simulation effect of the environment, and immerse the users in it (Lv, 2020). Thus, digital music, as an auditory art, can be applied to activate the motor system of brain or body through auditory mirror neurons, to produce corresponding intrinsic neural simulation actions, or even specific external body movements, such as nodding or stamping, in order to appreciate and understand creator’s intrinsic intention and emotion (Pando-Naude et al., 2021).
Traditional museum design often uses realistic approaches, such as recreating historical events and simulating scenes, to achieve the best viewing effect (Machidon et al., 2018). However, due to the limited exhibition space, there was confined imagination space that visitors can associate with, and the emotional connection between people and the objects has been significantly weakened. Based on the three states involved in human spatiality (existing in the surrounding world, the interpersonal world, and the world of the self) (Bridge, 2021), this study integrated digital music in the museum space exhibition, leading visitors to the virtual associative space, while their immersive empathy makes the cultural education in the museum to be more dynamic. The visitors will become the protagonists of historical events or the designers of emotional tone, which helps to form cognitive and affective empathy (Yi et al., 2022). It in turn enhances visitors’ experience, helping them better understand the stories and meanings behind the exhibits, and achieving sustainable development.
Based on the above literature review, we proposed the following hypotheses:
H1: Cognitive empathy has a significant positive impact on visitors’ experience, incorporating with the digital music in museums.
H2: Affective empathy has a significant positive impact on visitors’ experience incorporating with the digital music in museums.
Based on the above research hypotheses, a theoretical model for the museum auditory experience development has been constructed, as shown in Figure 1.
Theoretical model diagram.
Research Design
Variables and Measurement
This study conducted an exploratory experiment before the start of the formal ones, and confirmed the direction and feasibility of the research through the pre-survey, which facilitates the design of the subsequent questionnaire. The specific steps are as follows. First, we lay the ground for the interviews. We conducted fieldwork in the museum, feeling the atmosphere on-site, observing visitors’ behaviors and actions, preferences, and their degree of acceptance and understanding of culture. Meanwhile, we took note of their intuitive feelings of the museum from the perspective of an “insider,” before and after the digital music was being played.
Second, based on the characteristics of science education for the cultural heritage in museum, this study randomly selected 10 college students as participants. The main reason for us to choose the college students as the participants, lays in they are usually in the stage of learning and knowledge accumulation, and may be more interested in history, art, and culture. Through their participation, the auditory experience program of museums can be designed to be more educative and inspirational. Moreover, college students are usually more cultural literate and inclusive to new things, which could make them more willing to have new cultural experiences and provide unique insights into the museum auditory experience. In addition, college students are often sensitive to new technologies and innovations, they may be more willing to engage in experiment with and accept new technological applications. Therefore, interviews with college students can help us to better apply innovative technologies and design museum auditory experience programs. There were three parts in the interview. First, we need to understand the basic information of the interview subjects, including their gender, age, and major, as shown in the Table 1; second, we need to explore the intuitive feelings that the museum brings in their minds, including but not limited to the attractiveness of the exhibition content, the interactivity of the display mode, as well as their understanding and cognition of the history and culture; third, we also need to pay attention to the interview subjects’ feelings toward the museum after its integration with digital music, specifically including the physical experience perception, the environmental experience perception, and the landscape experience perception. Physical experience perception focuses on the subjective feelings brought by the audio-visual combination, such as whether the integration of music and exhibition content enhances their sense of participation. Environmental experience perception focuses on the comfort of the humanistic environment, the natural environment, and the safety environment, as well as the impact of digital music on these environments. And the landscape experience perception focuses on the cultural value of the landscape resources and its impact on the visitors. This meticulous interview process was designed to gain a comprehensive understanding of college students’ attitudes and perceptions of museums and the cultural heritage, so as to provide useful references to further explore the popularity of museum cultural heritage.
Basic Information About the Interviewed College Students.
Last, on the one hand, we refer to Davis (1983) interpersonal reactivity index to divide empathy into two dimensions: cognitive empathy (eight items) and affective empathy (nine items). Five-point Likert scale has been adopted (1 = strongly disagree. 5 = strongly agree). On the other hand, referring to the scale of tourists’ own sense of experience proposed by H. M. Lee and Smith (2015), three items are designed to measure the visitors’ auditory experience, and 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree. 5 = strongly agree) has been employed as well. Based on the above interview results, the context of cultural heritage was integrated to the initial scale, the variables and corresponding items were designed as shown in Table 2.
Items for Empathy and Experience.
Experimental Scene Design
Drawing on Cesario (2022), the experiment has been primarily placed in specific small museums to create immersive digital music experience, by carefully setting up digital music sounding tools, such as smart speakers. These speakers played musical compositions with unique and original timbres to create a distinctive atmosphere. As the visitor’s location within the museum changed, the researchers have flexibly adjusted the style and content of the digital music to fit with different scenarios, thereby affecting the visitor’s emotional state and experience. In this way, the researchers aim to help visitors gain a deeper understanding of the narratives presented in the museum. By altering the style and atmosphere of the music, the researchers sought to elicit emotional resonance of visitors, so that they could gain a deeper awareness of the underlying meaning conveyed by the Red Museum. This approach goes beyond simply conveying information, through emotional resonance and cognitive empathy, it allows visitors to truly feel the importance and far-reaching impact of history. Throughout the study, the researchers performed continuously observation to the emotional changes of the visitors and conducted a timely emotional survey at the end of the experiment, collecting feedback to improve their experience. Such careful observation and survey ensured the reliability and validity of the study, and also made the results more accurate and convincing. The experimental scenario is specifically shown in Figure 2.
Experimental scenario design simulation.
Research Results
Considering that individuals’ knowledge of museums varies by age, while the gender, occupation, educational background, and other conditions also affect their interests in visiting museums. The following items were designed to collect demographic information of the participants. The questionnaires were distributed through the experimental method paradigm. Seventy questionnaires were distributed in the museum visiting scenario, and after excluding the invalid questionnaires with random answers, missing questions, and inconsistencies, 61 valid questionnaires were obtained, with a valid recovery rate of 87.14%, which met the requirements. The basic information of the sample is shown in Table 3. The participants in the experiment mainly consisted of undergraduate students (accounting for more than 70% of the total), and their purpose of visiting museums was mainly for general sightseeing and cultural education, and 73.8% of them paid more attention to cultural inheritance in their visiting.
Distribution of Basic Information.
The corresponding structural equation models were then constructed based on the cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and auditory experience, as well as the question items and their scores of the participants mentioned above. In terms of external model loading analysis, as shown in Figure 3, the factor distribution of each dimension was in line with the expected setting of the scale, and to ensure the reliability of the data, the required indicators for the components were all above 0.6, and the five required indicators received good feedback after excluding the non-conforming items.
Structural equation modeling.
The R2 value of experience in the process of model testing was .793 and the adjusted R2 value was .786; and among the goodness of fit index of the saturated model, the SRMR was 0.089, the d_ULS was 0.940, the d_G was 1.202, and the NFI was 0.664, which indicated that the goodness of fit for this model was good. Overall, they showed the relatively good explanatory power of the latent variables on the experience.
In terms of construct reliability and validity analysis, the measurement index contains four aspects: reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s Alpha), which measures the reliability of the “sum” of a set of synoptic or parallel measures, and tests the internal consistency of the scale, with a coefficient of .8 or higher, representing good reliability (Cronbach, 1951). Consistent reliability coefficient (rho_A), which assesses the weight of the structure and provides a reliable measure for the construction of the PLS, generally needs to be above 0.7 to indicate good structure (Dijkstra & Henseler, 2015). Composite reliability (CR), an indicator used to assess convergent validity, should be greater than 0.6 in reactive models (Hair et al., 2019). Average extracted variance (AVE), calculates the explanatory power of the potential variables, as well as tests the convergent and discriminant validity of the scale, with an ideal value greater than 0.5 (Fornell & Larcker, 1981). This study employed the standardized results for the analysis, and the results were shown in Table 4. The reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s Alpha) for experience was .925, the rho_A was 0.925, the composite reliability (CR) was 0.952, the average extracted variance (AVE) was 0.869. The reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s Alpha) for affective empathy was .919, the rho_A was 0.924, the composite reliability (CR) was 0.935, the average extracted variance (AVE) was 0.674. The reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s Alpha) for cognitive empathy was .820, the rho_A was 0.867, the composite reliability (CR) was 0.870, and the average extracted variance (AVE) was 0.575. The reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s Alpha) of each latent variable was greater than .8, indicating that each latent variable had good reliability. The composite reliability (CR) greater than 0.8 further demonstrated the high reliability of the model; and the average extracted variance (AVE) of each latent variable was greater than 0.5. From the above analyses, it can be seen that the model fits well overall, the internal potential relationships significantly explain the utility, the estimation effects are all acceptable, and the reliability coefficients fit with the structure validity.
Reliability Testing of Latent Variables.
In terms of structural modeling analysis, the Bootstrapping method was used to calculate the T-statistics of each path coefficient and test their estimated significance level (two-tailed test), and the concrete parameters are shown in Table 5. The T-statistics of the structural equation model in the Bootstrapping test showed that all the path coefficients had high T-statistics: cognitive empathy for experience perception was 2.480 (between 1.96 and 2.58) and affective empathy for experience perception was 7.148 (>3.29), and the p-value for each path was less than .05, indicating that each path coefficient passed the corresponding significance testing and the model structure was stable (Streukens & Leroi-Werelds, 2016).
Significance Test Results of Path Coefficients.
The following conclusions were drawn based on the feedback from the above research data and the construction of structural equation models. In the goodness of fit index of the saturated model, SRMR is 0.089, d_ULS is 0.940, d_G is 1.202, and NFI is 0.664, indicating that the model has a good fitting effect. In general, it showed that each latent variable has a relatively good explanatory power.
First, Table 5 shows that the path coefficient of cognitive empathy to experience perception is 0.237, with a p-value of .013, suggesting that cognitive empathy has a significant positive impact on experience perception. It indicates that museums appropriately incorporate digital music to present historical stories, could create an immersive atmosphere, which not only helps visitors more focused on the historical stories of the exhibits and restore the cultural connotations conveyed by the designers, but also promotes their in-depth thinking about the meaning behind the historical events, so as to achieve the immersive empathy. It is conducive to further narrowing the gap between visitors and historical figures, allowing them to truly perceive culture in their hearts. Thus, H1 “cognitive empathy has a significantly positive impact on visitor experience” has been verified.
Second, Table 5 shows that the path coefficient of affective empathy to experience perception is 0.717, with a p-value of .000, which indicates that affective empathy also has a significant positive impact on experience, and that digital music could cause emotional fluctuations of visitors in tour to the museum. By combining auditory and visual effects, the spatial perception is constructed to generate visitors’ immersive empathy, which makes them feel the emotional transmission of the museum designer, and further leads to an outburst of emotion that engraves the culture. This proves that H2 “affective empathy has a significant positive impact on visitor experience” has been verified.
Discussion
Theoretical Significance
In order to explore the vision and path for the development of auditory experiences in museums, this study analyzed how museums can stimulate cognitive empathy and affective empathy through digital music, based on empathy theory, which in turn influences visitors’ experiences in museums.
First, we explored the sustainable paths of auditory experience development from the perspective of cognitive empathy. Nowadays, museums have become an indispensable part of people’s lives. Whether from organizational education or their own cultural identity, museums play the key role in generating excitement for people. However, most museums only focus on the display of cultural relics and monotonous storytelling, in which visitors only receive visual effect of words and historical artifacts, making it difficult to appreciate the story and heritage connotation behind the culture. Therefore, it is vital to enhance visitors’ auditory experience (Liu & Lin, 2021). Most visitors have to face the situation when they enter the museum and try to understand the cultural background of the time. A timely digital background music can isolate noise and make visitors more concentrated during their visit, which helps them to understand and accumulate the historical stories (Xu & Zhang, 2021). To this end, this study proposed an auditory experience development concept for museums based on visitors’ cognitive active immersion. Visitors could construct a unique sense of space through the combination of auditory and visual senses and digital music of each scenario in the museum based on their previous cognition and experience, which allows them to quickly catch the emotional tone and consciously immerse themselves in the revolutionary context of the time, thus improving their understanding and memory of the culture.
Second, the sustainable paths of auditory experience development has been explored from the perspective of affective empathy. Emotion is a precondition for learning, which not only generates empathy but also enhances visitors’ experience. Once visitors are emotionally engaged, the encountered content becomes unforgettable, and some studies have shown that digital background music leads to changes in visitors’ emotional states (Minas & Dennis, 2019). Museums need to not only reflect real historical events, but also allow visitors to understand the history, accept the history, and remember the history. Therefore, in terms of affective passive immersion, this study investigated the impact of visitors’ affective empathy on their experience by playing digital background music in different scenarios while they read the text and appreciate the artifacts. The results showed that when visitors’ emotions reach a certain breaking point, affective empathy can help to enhance their experience, and even after they leave the museum, they can recall the emotions they felt at that time, thus better inheriting the culture.
Practical Significance
The most important point to enhance visitors’ immersive experience is to improve their spatial experience, to make them part of the work in an interactive way, and to create a unique experience that can break the boundaries between people and artworks, as well as between self and others (H. Lee et al., 2020). Spatial experience design has five main characteristics: interaction, sense, vitality, memory, and event (Chamilothori et al., 2019). Based on this, museum designers can artificially construct a space where the sense of space and storytelling can strongly and authentically stimulate visitors’ behaviors and improve their experience. The immersive experience can be further divided into three stages, namely, engagement, engrossment, and total immersion (Martirosov et al., 2022). Firstly, the psychology of novelty seeking can be used to combine the historical story of the museum with digital background music in a new digital music scenario. Driven by curiosity, visitors pause and start to experience the combination of auditory and visual sensation. Secondly, by creating a narrative space, the spatial order of inner logic and meaning could be generated, together with the narrative design and expression of the architecture and spatial environment. The timeline is used for the spatial expression of narrative mainline clues, spatial behavior patterns, and narrative cultural symbols, emphasizing the narrator’s exchange of ideas through the medium to construct certain spatiotemporal relationships and narrative forms that build an environment rich in immersive empathy, for visitors to immerse themselves. Lastly, after being shaped by the environment, visitors will internalize cognitive and affective empathy, even leaving the museum, they could have a rather deep impression of the history narration and background music, which achieves the total immersion.
In this regard, this study argued that museums should improve on the following three aspects. First, we need to construct a digital music feature distribution map for each scenario of the museum, combine new technological tools, and designing corresponding music pieces to meet the needs of visitors’ visual and auditory senses, allow them to understand the historical process and interact with historical figures, both in spirit and thought. Second, we could strengthen the training of museum guides. Museum guides should be trained to master the cultural connotation, adopt a differentiated mode in their narration for different age groups of visitors, so that visitors can have in-depth understanding of the cultural values contained in the museum. Third, organizations should combine the corresponding cultural background to educate people about culture, convey cultural concepts and express humanistic feelings through a variety of advocacy approaches, lead visitors to think about the connotations behind the exhibitions, and trigger immersive empathy among visitors.
Limitations and Prospects
This study can help museums develop auditory experience paths to enhance visitors’ experience through cognitive empathy and affective empathy, while the findings provide strong support for the theoretical framework and the association between the research variables. However, this study also has some limitations. First, the participants were randomly chosen from a group of college students who were used as the basis for questionnaire design, which resulted in the somewhat limited scope of the study. Future research could conduct experiments based on different styles and eras of museums, using a wider sampling range to ensure the universality of the findings. Second, this study did not analyze whether there were factors other than empathy in digital music processing in museums, such as the impact of visitors’ preferences for the style of digital music on their perception. Factors related to the impact of digital music could be explored for additional correlation calculations in the future research. Third, this study did not validate the causal relationship between digital music and empathic traits. Future research can explore the physiological correlates in museum digital music and provide a way to unravel empathic personality attributes and situational factors. Fourth, future research should also delve deeper into the experience of designing musical installations at the Katowice Museum, exploring aspects such as musical rhythm and terminative dimension, observing in detail the dynamic process of people in museums, such as the changes in their focus of attention, mode of information acquisition, and level of engagement, and fine-tuning the mechanism of immersive empathy, which will help optimize the design of the exhibitions and improve visitors’ experience.
Conclusion
The inheritance of culture by museums depends on the visitors’ experience, which is determined by emotional attachment. And in psychology, empathy is the inner resource of this emotion. Therefore, empathy can be applied to the development of auditory experiences in museums, allowing visitors to take the initiative to understand the context and background, to immerse themselves in a carefully designed atmosphere throughout their tour, and to gain a comfortable and unique experience that meets their needs for emotional release and expression of values, thus achieving affective empathy between designers and visitors (Al-Msallam, 2020).
The integration of digital music can trigger cognitive empathy and affective empathy in visitors during their museum visit, improving their experience, including physical experience perception, environmental experience perception (X. Li, Wirawan, Ye, et al., 2021), and landscape experience perception, both rationally and perceptually. First, the mobilization of visual and auditory sensory perceptions and the creation of the overall atmosphere place visitors in the scenario with digital music, which forms a dialogue that transcends time and space, makes the boring and rigid traditional history narration to be vivid and concrete, enhancing the physical experience of visitors and the comfort of their own experience. Second, the combination of auditory and visual senses in the museum can be regarded as a new “space” created by human beings, the “best place” for visitors to empathize with. Since museums are not only the place for preserving and displaying artifacts, but also the selected place for exporting the essentials of history and culture (Ahmadjonovna & Bakhromovich, 2020). They should not stay satisfied with only meeting the visual needs of visitors, but should incorporate digital music, and turn the stiff words into dynamic stories, which immerse visitors in the cultural deposits and even internalize the mission of cultural inheritance. Eventually, in the interweaving of multi-dimensional sensory experiences and the constructed images, visitors’ cultural memory is formed and deepened (Luo et al., 2022), thus enhancing the value of the landscape and building a strong link between visitors and culture.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We appreciate the time and effort that reviewers put into reviewing our manuscript and providing us with valuable comments and suggestions.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, K.Y. and Z.X.; Methodology, Y.L. and Y.W.; Software, Y.W.; Formal analysis, K.Y. and Z.X.; Investigation, Y.L. and Y.W.; Writing—original draft, K.Y., Z.X., and Y.W.; Funding acquisition, K.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The project was supported by Social Science Foundation Project in Jiangxi Province (23ZXRC36), National Social Science Fund Post-funding Project (22FXWB020), General Project of the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Project (22YJC630190), Science and Technology Project of the Department of Education in Jiangxi Province (GJJ2200668), General Project of Education of Humanities and Social Science Research in Universities of Jiangxi Province (GL23212), Social Science Planning Project in Nanchang City (GL202304), Higher Education Association Project in Jiangxi Province (ZX2-C-002), Graduate Innovation Special Fund Project in Jiangxi Province (YC2023-S431).
Data Availability Statement
All data relevant to the study are included in the article. In addition, the data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available.