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Audio tours: Outdoor

Going beyond indoor, museum-only tours, we hunted iTunes and tourism-related Web sites to find audio tours of Chicago neighborhoods and parks. Read on to find out more about what we liked and didn’t like, or see a related post about our museum tours.

Amy:

I spent $10 to download the Chicago “Audissey” guide to Chicago’s Loop for two reasons: 1) I wanted to use my iPod as my audio guide on this tour and 2) I wanted to hear the music that poet (and Chicago native) Kevin Coval chose to include with this tour. The tour begins at N. State and E. Hubbard, winds east along the Chicago River, includes an El ride to Madison and ends in Millennium Park.

Thumbs up:
-Coval’s “Ode to the El,” a poem written at the request of the Chicago Tribune, is the narration for the short El ride through the Loop, and he often includes tibdits about his family and his Chicago life, such as the restaurant his Aunt eats at in the old Marshall Field’s (now Macy’s) on Washington and how he often eats lunch and listens to free live music at the Chicago Cultural Center. His native Chicagoan accent (where Chicago is pronounced Chi-caw-go) and enthusiasm for the city also makes the tour worthwhile.
-The tour also includes a glimpse into Chicago’s mob past, as the tour takes participants past the spot a gangster was cut down on Madison back in the 1920s.

Hope:

Travel Magazine’s ‘Walks of a Lifetime’ podcast, produced by National Geographic Traveler, provided a walking tour of the South end to the North end of the Chicago loop. Overall, I thought that this podcast utilized vivid descriptions, effective noises and music. Along the tour, the ambient noises playing in the background helped ground me in my surroundings. For example, as I approached the Buckingham fountain in Grant Park, the podcast played splashing water noises and the sound of children laughing. The Grant Park section of the tour was also interesting because of the level of historic information it provided. Before listening to the podcast, I had a hard time visualizing the vast expanse of territory that was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Thumbs up:
-The most successful parts of the tour were those in which the tour guide posed questions to the listener. For example, in the section along the Magnificent Mile, the guide asked me to think about the types of people that I spot walking there on a daily basis. These more interactive sections of the tour helped improve my concentration of my surroundings. At the conclusion of the tour, the guide announced that there would be a ten-question quiz, which was a nice recap.

Thumbs down:
-The weak areas of the podcast were those that did not transition well. The podcast made an abrupt transition from Chicago restaurants to its section on the Art Institute of Chicago, which I found to be extremely rushed. I would have preferred to hear more about the Art Institute and its collection, rather than the Macy’s store on State Street or the Chicago Cultural Center on Michigan Avenue, which were both covered in heavier detail. It would have been easier on the listener if each location had been allotted a roughly equal amount of time.

Ki Mae:

Oak Park is home to the world’s largest collection of Wright-designed buildings and the Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District Self-Guided Audio Tour lets visitors explore the historic district at their own pace. Downloaded to a mini iPod, the 45-minute audio track describes thirteen Wright-designed Prairie-style and Victorian homes. For the most part (and on a rare sunny Chicago spring day), this is a great way to learn about one of the country’s finest architects and the environment that influenced him.

Thumbs down:
-It was not always clear that you were looking at the home being discussed on the audio track – clearer directional cues could help.
-More interactivity/enhanced media could also enrich the experience (i.e. digital renderings of the neighborhood during Wright’s time or photos of the sites before his homes were built).

Joyce:

I took the Chicago Office of Tourism’s Millennium Park Audio Tour, which included descriptions of the Crown Fountain, which displays Chicagoans’ faces on a 50-foot-tall LED display, and Cloud Gate, also affectionately known as the reflective “bean.”

Thumbs up:
-I liked the variety of voices in the narration, such as Chicagoans’ reactions to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, an outdoor concert venue designed by Frank Gehry. I also liked that Gehry’s voice was included as he described the pavilion’s concept and design.

Thumbs down:
-There didn’t seem to be a unifying theme throughout the tour stops. Also, since the tour was self-guided and each stop was an individual track, it would have been nice to have a segue between tour stops while walking to the next destination. It was too easy to pause a track and not have much incentive to continue, without anything holding my attention.

Hilary:

The next time you want to take a loop around Chicago’s loop, the Chicago Loop Alliance Web site may help guide your footsteps.

In 2006, the Alliance launched an interactive map with audio walking tours to allow tourists and Chicago lovers alike to learn more about the Second City.

Thumbs up:

Not only is the map visually appealing — with labeled streets and numbered buildings along the tour — it gives the user options about what to see. The walking tours are broken down into three choices: the theatre district tour, the art tour and the landmark loop tour. I chose the latter, which consists of a narrated tour of historic buildings and tourist destinations downtown.

The narration, which is sprinkled with facts and tidbits from local historians and architecture experts, can be downloaded to an MP3 player. The walk begins along the Chicago River, then heads south on State Street for five city blocks, loops east along Congress Parkway toward Lake Shore Drive, and brings the walk full circle to Michigan Avenue.

Those ambitious, adventurous types can hit the streets and tread the tour at their leisure. But, just as important in multimedia storytelling is the ability to view the city sights via the computer screen. This is also possible, by logging on to the website and taking the less scenic route with the click of the mouse.

Thursday, April 10th, 2008 Filed under Audio tours |