How does music affect us? How does the body respond to sound? 

Your Inner Symphony, a new collaboration between Nexus Studios and Kinda Studios, developed for the Barbican, explores these questions and more by fusing design and neuroscience.

Where: Barbican Centre
When: 22 May to 31 August

Part of the Feel the Sound exhibition, this site-specific installation invites visitors to measure their own biorhythms – heart rate, heart rate variability, and galvanic skin response – at key moments throughout the experience. By scanning your hand, biometric data is captured and then transformed into a unique visualisation that reflects each visitor’s internal response to sound. These visualisations can be viewed on-screen and accessed later via a printed QR code.

As you move through the exhibition, you’ll have multiple opportunities to interact with the installation. At the layered voices of UN/BOUND, you can scan your QR code again to track your progress and build on your visualisation with new inputs. After the thumping bass of Joyride’s tricked-out cars gets your blood pumping, check in once more to see how your reaction has evolved.

It all comes together at The Well, right in the centre of the Barbican, where all visitors’ unique experiences are combined for a large communal visualisation displayed on a sunken screen.  By scanning your QR code, visitors add to an ever-evolving real-time display that reflects the collective emotional experience of the audience.

Feel the Sound features 11 interactive installations designed to explore how sound influences emotion, memory, and physical sensation. The exhibition looks to rearrange what visitors think sound is. It includes multi-sensory installations that take you on a journey across locations in the Barbican, from our car parks to the Lakeside Terrace.

After its run at the Barbican, Your Inner Symphony will begin an international tour, with its first stop at MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives in Tokyo.

This is an exhibition experience on a different frequency.

Learn more and grab your tickets here.