Press room

Feel the Sound 

Co-produced by MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, Takanawa Gateway City, Tokyo, Japan. 

Opening in May 2025, the Barbican announces Feel the Sound, a bold new multi-sensory exhibition experience exploring our personal relationship to sound and embracing a world of listening that goes beyond the audio. Through a series of eleven commissions and installations – including six new commissions - Feel the Sound takes place in spaces across the Barbican Centre, from the entrance on Silk Street, in The Curve, the public foyers, to outdoors on the Centre’s Lakeside Terrace. 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 in late 2026.  

Frequencies, sound, rhythmic patterns and vibrations define everything around us. From the soundtrack of our environments to the rhythm of our heartbeat, frequencies are constantly creating and changing how we see, hear and feel the world. Feel the Sound is an invitation to awaken the senses, embrace our sonic world and discover the sound in each of us. Each installation will be an opportunity to explore how sound can be experienced in a multitude of ways. By considering our body as a listening device, we can begin to adjust our understanding of ourselves and tune in to the world through a different frequency.   

Audiences can lose themselves in an underground car park club space, sing with a digital quantum choir, listen to their inner symphony, experience music without sound and discover a song for their future self.   

A number of exciting projects are confirmed to be part of Feel the Sound, with more to be announced. 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 collects and disperses sounds from across the Barbican site, blending them with a curated sonic archive sourced from field recordists across the world. Trans Voices, the first professional trans+ vocal collective, ILĀ and spatial sound art studio MONOM have created UN/BOUND – a holographic choral exploration, which invites visitors to add their voice to the ever-evolving chorus.  

A new collaboration with Boiler Room celebrates 15 years of the iconic broadcasts that re-defined underground club culture; Joyride by rave architecture collective Temporary Pleasure transforms The Barbican's Car Park 5 into a temporary club space, where 'boy racer' subculture collides with DIY music communities and modified car sound systems are reimagined as instruments of music, memory, and connection. Also in Car Park 5, the powerful potential for sound to evoke memory is explored in Forever Frequencies, a series of monoliths created by Domestic Data Streamers, which employ generative AI and music boxes to create future music memories that haven’t yet happened. And Your Inner Symphony, a collaboration between Kinda Studios and Nexus Studios fuses neuroscience and design to capture visitors’ emotional responses, revealing the invisible ways music shapes our internal rhythms.   

Joining new commissions are existing works being adapted in collaboration with groundbreaking artists exclusively for this presentation. The healing properties of sound are at the heart of Resonant Frequencies, a multisensory installation created by Evan Ifekoya informed by indigenous sound practices, which invites audiences to reflect and connect with their own internal vibration. Embracing connection is also the focus of Resonance Continuum created by artists Murthovic and Thiruda of Elsewhere in India,which offers a decolonial perspective of Indian music, blending ancient frequencies with an interactive futuristic, post-cyberpunk dance experience. 

Nicole L’Huillier with Sarah Mackenzie and the team from MUTEK have together curated two distinct artist-led lab-style spaces, which explore ‘embodied listening’ and the endless creative possibilities of experimenting with and experiencing sound.

And to evoke the spirit of festivals and celebration, the Lakeside Terrace will embrace Heightened Lyric – a series of kites that represent the missed dimensions and experiences of sound, created by poet and writer Raymond Antrobus.  

Feel the Sound is part of a multidisciplinary programme of events taking place throughout the summer celebrating music and sound and how it influences our lives. The Summer programme also includes the World Premiere of a new version of the award-winning Virtual Reality experience In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats from Darren Emerson & East City Films which delights and unifies audiences around the nostalgic immersive adventure of finding an Acid House rave in 1989. Taking place in The Pit from 22 May to 3 August, the creators push the technology even further to create a truly collective experience; where friends share the same virtual space and interact together on a euphoric journey into the heart of a music revolution. 

The full summer season programme, including talks and film screenings, free music gigs, club nights, and participatory events designed to connect and inspire Barbican’s young audiences – and future artists will be announced in March. Audiences can sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear.  https://www.barbican.org.uk/sign-up 

Devyani Saltzman, Director for Arts & Participation, Barbican Centre says: "This exhibition marks the continued growth of Barbican Centre as a leading producer and presenter of immersive experiences and is a cornerstone of our Summer season." 

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 which launch 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 and 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”.   

A selection of images for Feel The Sound are available for download here. Please use credit information as available on image titles.