Vienna’s House of Music opens an entire floor for a VR experience

Haus der Musik in Vienna will provide its visitors with a new way to learn more about sounds and acoustics

Earlier this year, the Sound Museum in Vienna opened a second floor, dedicated to the creation of music. SONOTOPIA allows visitors to create their own visual-acoustic work of art and to shape and personalise sounds in a way that has never been seen before.

4 rooms with different experiences

The space is organised in different sections depending on the different interests of the visitors. Here they can find:

• The Origin room – a darker room where they can focus on the experience of listening and move through a sound landscape with different sound sources. Acoustics and various sounds allow people to explore it further.
• The Instrumentarium – visitors can take a closer look at large musical instruments. Original organ pipes (Aeorophon), a large drum (Membranophon), an oversized string instrument (Chordophon) and xylophone plates on the ceiling (Idiophone) show the operation of various instruments.
• Sonotopia Universe and Lab – here visitors can create sounds that shape and harmonise visually and acoustically through virtual reality techniques. This is a new technology that has not been used until now.
• The Zoo concert – this part is specially created for younger participants and is based on Marko Simsa's children's book "Zoo Concert". It takes them on an interactive and musical adventure trip and an exciting fairy tale for the curious explorers.

This is a project concluded between the House of Music and Wien Holding. The interactive sound museum covers an area of 5000 m2 and was created by four Austrian universities, two foreign university institutes, a young team of musicians and musicologists, multimedia artists, sound engineers, architects, and students.

The idea of the project is to show us how diverse and different are the sounds that surround us and that we hear every day. From the background noise that a baby hears in the womb, to the music of the future, the visitor of the museum can take home a great number of impressions from the Haus der Musik.