Touted as the world’s first voice-activated museum of language, Planet Word is located in the former Franklin School, a National Historic Landmark. Through immersive learning galleries, visitors use their own voices to engage with and activate exhibits.

With a stated mission of communicating about language, speech intelligibility was a clear and critical goal for the project. SHA worked closely with Local Projects to integrate audio delivery and acoustic control into these unique galleries to meet this brief, while maintaining the modern exhibit aesthetic with minimal visible audio devices. Innovative approaches such as activating letters in the Word Wall were employed through detailed collaboration between designers and fabricators. SHA also performed the calibration of the varied audio systems throughout the project to ensure optimal performance in keeping with design expectations.