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Vienna is known throughout the world as a center of music, a city that is suffused in its history of music, opera and composers—one need only think of Mozart, Beethoven, and even Schönberg, to realize that it indeed was a hotbed of innovation in the field. It is therefore only fitting that a museum should be dedicated to the subject itself, to musicology and to sound. The House of Music, in Vienna’s 1st district, is itself an innovation. It received the Austrian Museum Prize for its original, futuristic design, yet manages to fuse the modern with the traditional. It not only aims to educate young and old about music, but it does so in a playful fun way. For example, Mozart himself can be found meeting with visiting children, who may just be in the process of “composing” their own CD.
While the first floor is dedicated to the history of the Vienna Philharmonic, and the third floor has a large exhibit on the composers of Vienna’s classical era, the second and fourth floors offer a more unconventional exploration of the concepts of sound and music. The “Sonosphere” exhibit recreates the sounds heard in the womb; the “Sound Gallery” filters sounds out from the microcosm, the macrocosm and the human body to be listened to individually, only to mix them all back together with one’s own voice and well known melodies using the “Evolution Machine.” The “Brain Opera,” created by Tod Machover, Professor of Composition at the MIT Media Lab, not only gives the visitor a glimpse of what the future of music may be, but allows them to create their own soundscapes. These are only a few of the multi-media, interactive exhibits that can be seen and heard at the House of Music, a place that is definitely worth checking out when in Vienna. |
