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.
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.
“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 coproducer 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
Maholo Uchida, Director / Curator of MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, Takanawa Gateway City, Tokyo
exhibition will experience a new world full of rich sounds and musical power”.
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, ILA & 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.
courtesy of the artists
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.
Feel the Sound ,22nd May–31st Aug 2025
Barbican Centre
Co-produced by MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives, Takanawa Gateway City, Tokyo, Japan.
Exhibition Catalogue The exhibition will be accompanied by a playful and unique catalogue, influenced by music and sound magazines, designed by Other Office, a multidisciplinary creative practice run by Simon Sweeney & Shauna Buckley, who specialise in visual identities, interactive work, and printed matter.
Barbican Immersive creates multi-sensory experiences that explore some of life’s biggest themes and ideas in totally new, inspiring and unexpected ways. We invite audiences to be at the centre of the experience, using technology and digital creativity to celebrate and challenge contemporary culture by bringing together art, design, science, and ground- breaking research. Always experiential, these exhibitions then tour the world. Previous exhibitions include AI: More Than Human, Our Time on Earth, Virtual Realms: videogames transformed, Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form and Game On.
