The Musée de la Vie d'Autrefois: an innovative audio tour with A-Guide and Audiopen for autumn 2025

The Musée de la Vie d'Autrefois in Ormes sur Voulzie is a unique place where visitors discover everyday life in France between 1800 and 1950. With more than 60,000 objects displayed across 101 scenes, the museum presents a fascinating collection created by Viviane and Jérôme de Witt, who devoted ten years of their lives to acquiring and enriching this exceptional ensemble, supported by private donations.

An innovative tour: A-Guide and Audiopen for an immersive experience

Ahead of the autumn 2025 season, the museum decided to deploy 40 A-Guides and keep its 30 Audiopens. Although these two tools use different technologies, they carry the same audio content and follow the same visitor route.

The Audiopens have been in place since the museum opened in October 2017. Rather than fully renewing its fleet of devices in 2025, the museum chose to offer two different interpretation solutions, allowing visitors to freely choose the tool that best matches their preferences: the Audiopen for a fun, interactive approach, the A-Guide for a more traditional solution, appreciated for its ease of use.

A-Guide: an audio experience accessible to all

The A-Guide is a modern audio guide that lets visitors move freely around the museum while accessing rich, informative audio commentary, simply by pressing the numbers displayed on the panels and labels. Available in French and English, it brings to life the daily lives of the French across a 150-year period, through the tools, objects and machines used at the time.

Audiopen: a playful approach for young visitors

The Audiopen offers the same content as the A-Guide, but its interactive nature engages children in a more playful way: they simply point the tip of the device at specific labels along the route to trigger the audio commentary. This feature makes exploring the museum more autonomous and fun for the youngest visitors.

Content designed for all audiences

The audio content was created in collaboration with Sycomore, a company specializing in the creation of interactive audio tours. Designed to be accessible to everyone, including young children, it is available in French and English. Autumn 2025 will see the installation and delivery of the 40 A-Guides, along with staff training to guarantee an optimal experience and simplify the logistical management of the devices.

Enthusiastic visitors

Reviews on TripAdvisor attest to the richness of the experience. Reton81 (July 2024) mentions "a rich museum with a very large collection of objects", "a very pleasant welcome" and "an audio guide and a game that enrich the visit and captivate young and old alike". Elsaxelle (August 2023) describes "an extremely well-stocked museum" where, "thanks to the audio guide provided with the entrance ticket, you learn more", with the visit punctuated by a little game of spotting an odd object here and there.

Thanks to modern technologies such as the A-Guide and the Audiopen, every visitor — adult or child, with family or alone — can dive into history in an interactive and engaging way, within a unique world of sound.