The Brooklyn Museum
Turning curatorial expertise into professionally produced audio across dozens of exhibitions, without asking the museum to build a production team of its own.
The Situation
Brooklyn Museum wanted to bring real audio content to Bloomberg Connects, the free app Bloomberg Philanthropies built to give visitors access to behind-the-scenes content across more than 1,500 museums and cultural institutions worldwide. Bloomberg funds and maintains the technical platform, but each institution is responsible for creating its own content, which meant Brooklyn Museum needed a real production partner, not just someone to press record.
As a museum, their expertise was curatorial and academic, not audio production, and building an in-house team capable of directing, recording, editing and mixing at a genuinely professional level didn't make sense for what they needed. That's the gap we want to fill: bringing serious production expertise to an institution at a scale and price point that made sense, without asking them to become a content operation themselves or hire the kind of dedicated production staff a project like this would otherwise require.
We also happen to live a fifteen-minute walk from the museum, are members, and have loved it for years, which made this an especially meaningful, ongoing relationship well beyond the brief.
The Approach
We coordinated directly with Brooklyn Museum's digital producer, who managed the relationship with Bloomberg and worked internally with curators and museum leadership to figure out what content the budget could support each cycle. Over several years, that relationship grew into a real body of work spanning both the museum's permanent collections and its biggest special exhibitions.
On the permanent-collection side, we produced audio for the reinstalled Arts of Asia galleries, working directly with curators to bring depth to a suite of works that quietly forms a huge part of the museum's identity. On the special-exhibition side, the range got a lot bigger: Africa Fashion, the largest presentation of its kind ever mounted in North America, It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby, where Gadsby herself recorded a genuinely sharp, comedic audio tour, and Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, built around the couple's own art collection. In 2024, that work culminated in Brooklyn Icons, the museum's bicentennial program spotlighting 200 standout works across its entire 200-year history, and produced across the museum's celebrated Dinner Party installation (our personal favorite) as well.
One project stood out as something closer to talent production than traditional museum audio: for Spike Lee: Creative Sources, built from Lee's own 300-plus-item personal collection, we recorded him directly at his studio, 40 Acres and a Mule in Fort Greene, walking through the objects in his own words. That's a different kind of session than working with museum staff, a little bit of celebrity talent management, a lot a bit of capturing what makes this person special.
For the curator-driven material specifically, the process usually worked the same way: curators would write long-form background material, encyclopedia-style, on a set of objects, and we'd bring several of them into our studio for full recording days, working through dozens of pieces in a single sitting. Our job was turning that academic material into something worth stopping to listen to, less about what was already on the wall placard, more about the human story behind a piece and how it came to be part of the collection.
The Craft Challenge
Curators, god bless ‘em, aren't voiceover talent, and as enthusiastic as they are this is decidedly not part of their job description. That shaped almost everything about the production process. Getting genuinely natural-sounding delivery required real, hands-on directing in the room, helping people who think and write for a living learn to sound like themselves out loud rather than reciting text. In post-production, that meant splicing together many takes per piece to find the most natural version of each moment, across dozens of speakers with wildly different levels of on-mic experience.
The editorial pacing needed its own careful balance throughout. A visitor standing in front of a piece doesn't want five minutes of meandering audio. At the same time, rigid, clipped delivery sounds like a canned tour rather than genuine insight. We aimed for something that felt like a friend telling you about something they genuinely thought was amazing, snappy enough to respect a visitor's patience, and warm enough to feel the same enthusiasm for the art.
We also built a custom sonic identity for the tours, an original piece of music adapted specifically to open and close each segment. Tonally, we deliberately avoided leaning into Brooklyn stereotypes or trying to sound trendy for its own sake. The goal was something serious enough to match a major cultural institution's academic credibility, without being stuffy.
The Outcome
The tours launched on Bloomberg Connects and were polished enough that Brooklyn Museum chose to publish them on their own public podcast feed as well, well beyond what the Bloomberg platform alone required. What started as a smaller initiative in the early 2020s grew into a genuinely multi-year relationship, spanning both quiet permanent-collection work and some of the museum's highest-profile exhibitions, right through its 200th anniversary program in 2024. That's the kind of relationship we're proudest of: not a single project, but an institution that kept coming back because the work held up, at a scale and cost that made sense for them to keep investing.
Seaplane Armada helps cultural institutions bring real production expertise to their collections, at a scale that fits how museums actually operate. If your institution has a story that deserves better than a placard, get in touch at theadmiral@seaplanearmada.com
