Press room

This summer, the Barbican invites audiences to step into Feel the Sound, a new multi-sensory immersive exhibition that transforms how we think about sound. Taking place across the Centre, visitors can explore how sound shapes emotions, memories, and even physical sensations. Feel the Sound challenges us to listen not just with our ears, but with our whole bodies – redefining what we hear, how we feel, and what we think we know about ourselves. Tickets for Feel the Sound are now on sale. 

Featuring cutting-edge technology and newly commissioned artworks, this unique exhibition experience comprises 11 interactive installations that invite audiences to dance to beats from car sound-systems, join in an ever-expanding digital choir, discover their personal inner symphony, and feel music without any sound. 

From 22 May to 31 August, Feel the Sound takes visitors on a journey across locations in the Barbican, from the entrance on Silk Street, in The Curve, the public foyers, to outdoors on the Centre’s Lakeside. For the first time, the Centre’s underground Car Parks will also be part of the exhibition experience. Following this premiere run, Feel the Sound will embark on an international tour, including to MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, Tokyo.  

Created especially for Feel the Sound, four new commissions resonate from the past, reverberate with the future and transform our understanding of space and time: 

• Observatory Station by sound artist Miyu Hosoi, with contribution from global sound project Cities and Memory, mixes archive field recordings from around the world with sounds from across the Barbican to ask visitors arriving at Silk Street to imagine the daily life of a stranger.
• UN/BOUND by TRANS VOICES, ILĀ & MONOM, with contribution from Patty Ayukawa, invites visitors to wander through a holographic choral experience and connect to a vivid soundscape by listening or using their own voice. UN/BOUND reveals the voice as a means of true expression, illuminating new spaces of belonging and collective resonance, where deep listening acts as a catalyst for change.
• Your Inner Symphony, a collaboration between Kinda Studios and Nexus Studios, fuses neuroscience and design, making our internal vibrations visible to reveal the unseen connection between music, emotion, and the body’s response.
• Joyride by Temporary Pleasure is the first ever installation to spill out of the Barbican and into the car park to recall the Y2K era of boy racers and rave, modified car sound systems and DIY music. 

Three further commissions are adapted by the artists for the exhibition:  

• Resonant Frequencies created by artist Evan Ifekoya and adapted following their solo exhibition at Migros Museum, Switzerland, features two works – The Welcome and The Central Sun – which incorporate frequencies believed to have healing effects. With focused, intentional listening, visitors can synchronise their bodies with their surroundings to find harmony and repair. 
• Resonance Continuum created by artists Murthovic and Thiruda of transmedia collective Elsewhere in India, imagines a musical odyssey that amplifies South Asian traditions and promotes a decolonised, hopeful vision of the future.
• Forever Frequencies created by Barcelona-based Domestic Data Streamers employs generative AI to craft unique melodies based on the answers to two questions: ‘What is a memory involving music that you would like to relive?’ and ‘What musical moment would complete your life’s story? 
    

Feel the Sound also includes two experiential spaces titled Embodied Listening Playground and Sonic Listening Playground, co-created by Nicole L’Huillier with Sarah Mackenzie and the team from MUTEK, which encourage visitors to listen not just with their ears, but with their whole body, exploring how sound shapes our connection to ourselves, each other, and the environments we inhabit. Among the artists featured in these experiential spaces are Dame Evelyn Glennie, Holly Herndon, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Daito Manabe.  

Completing the journey, Feel the Sound heads outside onto the Lakeside Terrace with Raymond Antrobus’ Heightened Lyric which is commissioned to acknowledge the gap often found between the hearing and non-hearing world. Seven kites flying high above the Lakeside serve as a heightened tribute to sounds that have gone unheard. Each kite carries an extract of poetry about (missing) sound, accompanied by the British Sign Language interpretation of the words. The physical space occupied by these sculptures in the sky is combined with a striking absence of audio.  

Luke Kemp, Head of Creative Programme, Barbican Immersive says: “Feel the Sound is an invitation to explore the expanded world of sound, how we feel it, see it and the possibilities it provides for us to understand ourselves and the world differently. Ultimately, we are sonic beings. This is an exciting opportunity to open up new spaces across the Barbican and think about where we encounter sound both in our bodies and throughout the Centre. Feel the Sound joins our roster of experiential exhibitions launched at the Barbican before touring the world. Previously we’ve focused on AI (AI, More Than Human), the climate emergency (Our Time on Earth), and this time, the rhythm of the planet and our bodies.”  

Maholo Uchida, Director / Curator of MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, Takanawa Gateway City, Tokyo, says: "MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, which is scheduled to open in 2026, has been involved in the planning of Feel the Sound as a co- producer from the very beginning, as its first international curatorial project. As the world is inundated with visual information, we believe that re-examining sound and music as the most unified forms of expression with the human body, and reconnecting music and "us" will provide an opportunity to imagine the future narratives of humanity. Everyone who visits the exhibition will experience a new world full of rich sounds and musical power”.  

Feel the Sound is a highlight of the Barbican-wide summer 2025 season Frequencies: the sounds that shape us, a curated programme featuring a packed programme of film screenings, concerts, events, workshops and talks which explore how the power of sound moves more than just the body, and how it continues to inspire generations to rebel and create change. Alongside Feel the Sound, Frequencies includes the world premiere of a new version of Darren Emerson’s award-winning Virtual Reality experience In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, where friends share the same virtual space and interact together on a euphoric journey in search of an Acid House rave in 1989, and Rebel Radio, a month-long programme of broadcasts, talks, workshops, club experience and screenings celebrating London’s Pirate Radio story and exploring radio as a space for community, creativity, and subversion. See the full press release here. 

Feel the Sound is sponsored by Destination Partner: Culture Mile BID and Audio Partner d&b audiotechnik with additional support from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.

Further information on individual installations can be found on the press release. A selection of images for Feel the Sound are available for download here. Please use credit information as available on the image sheet.