Signet’s Integrity voice alarm system has been installed at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery.

The art museum, which was founded in 1923, was revamped last year and is now housed in a new “state-of-the-art” building. Its 4,000-strong collection includes paintings by Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore.

Voice alarm and public address Integrity, selected and installed by Clarity UK, has also been designed to play background music and play specially recorded messages.

More than 200 loudspeakers have been added to the building, a process that saw Clarity’s design team work closely with architects Mott MacDonald. The design, installation and commissioning of the system took around 12 months to complete.

Giles Palmer of Clarity said: “This was a complicated installation as the structure contained vast amounts of concrete and hard surfaces. Therefore, loudspeaker types and placement required careful consideration. We also used digital signal processing devices to aid with the acoustics.

“Microphones can be connected to the system to facilitate announcements, presentations and guided tours around the building. As a precaution against interference and distortion, Clarity also installed Signet’s Psiren 28 band graphic equaliser/ambient noise sensing processing system to automatically adjust the systems levels depending on the ambient background noise.”

Infrared assistive listening systems have also been fitted throughout the site. The modulators were set up to transmit sound via invisible light beams to infrared receivers placed around the Gallery. A total of eight sound field systems, made up of a microphone and small speaker system, have also been fitted in special education rooms at the Gallery - to amplify the sound of the speaker’s voice in accordance with the hearing capabilities of the people in the room.

Clarity is now working on further modifications to the system due to new areas in the Gallery that require voice alarm zones.