From Hearing to Feeling: The New Function of Sound

What if sound isn’t just something we listen to, but something that listens back? Not the kind pressed into sheet music or forced through headphones. This is an older, stranger sound: tactile, cinematic, alive, visceral, almost feral. The kind that blooms in your chest before your ears can help name it. The kind that hums under the city like a secret. The kind that doesn’t just move you; it knows you. If this sounds enticing, find out more in From Hearing to Feeling: The New Function of Sound.

You may well have had an experience or even many, where, as much as you listen to a piece of music, your body is experiencing it too?

This summer, at London’s Barbican Centre, sound is no longer just something to listen to. It’s something to touch. Step into Feel The Sound: a multi-sensory exhibition, where music ceases to be just background, and becomes the whole architecture of experience. Here, sound isn’t mere decoration; it’s a function. Of identity. Of memory. Emotion. Grief. Joy. Rebellion.

If this sounds like magic, that’s because it is.

Across eleven installations that sprawl through corridors, car parks, digital skies, and lakesides, Feel the Sound urges us to hear with our skin, our synapses and our stories. This isn’t just an art show. This is an invitation. An invitation to remember who we are: a rhythmic, sonic being.

Façade, MACS MTO. Courtesy of Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO. Photo by Laurent Eleine.

Take Your Inner Symphony, a collaboration between Kinda Studios and Nexus Studios, that transforms your heartbeat, breath and consciousness into sound. Here, your body becomes both orchestra and audience. What you hear is you, unfiltered. Your inner state, translated into music. Science fuses with intimacy. Emotion becomes audible. The soundtrack isn’t external; it’s been inside you all along.

Or Resonant Frequencies, a meditative installation by Evan Ifekoya that invites you to experience sound through your body, rather than your ears. Two dimly lit spaces pulse with low, steady frequencies: one shaped by water, and the other by the quiet rhythm of the sun. These tones, long associated with healing, travel through the room in waves, gently slowing your breath and softening your attention. There’s no narrative, no drama and no narration; just a feeling of being held. It’s subtle, but it stays with you. The way good silence does.

A Temple, A Shrine, A Mosque, A Church, 2022. Gold ink on hand-woven mats by craftswomen from Al Ghadeer, Abu Dhabi. Photo by Anpis Wang, Courtesy of the artist and TKG+, Tapiei, Taiwan.

Not all sounds heal, though. Some disrupt. Some force you to remember. Joyride is a queer reclamation of Y2K racer culture; it transforms wrecked cars into sound sculptures. Set deep in the Barbican’s underground car park, it’s part rave, part archive, and past protest. Subwoofers rumble. Neon flickers. The air feels heavy with memory. Here, sound isn’t soothing and polished; it’s loud, messy, defiant. It’s a tribute.

In UN/BOUND, voices, trans voices: layered, fragmented, brave, bloom into a holographic choir. You walk through them, and they ripple all around you. Add your own voice, if you dare. The result may not always be harmony, but it is honesty. Expression. Release. Listening becomes an act of solidarity. Of political care. Of presence.

Elsewhere, Raymond Antrobus reminds us what sound doesn’t do; who it excludes. His installation, Heightened Lyric, flies above the Barbican’s lakeside in the form of seven kites, each inscribed with poetry in British Sign Language. Silent, vast and wildly eloquent. A tribute to the sounds that live beyond just hearing.

MACS MTO garden. Courtesy of Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO. Photo by Jean-Yves Lacôte.

The deeper you go, the more the exhibitions unravels you. It breaks free from the neat idea that sound is just a passive medium. It isn’t. It moves. It mourns. It revolts. It remembers. It functions as a prosthetic for time. A prosthetic for self.

Even the exhibition’s co-producers, Tokyo’s Museum of Narratives (MoN Takanawa), describe sound as the most unified form of expression with the human body. A language that predates language. That doesn’t need translation. That is translation.

Which is why Feel the Sound doesn’t feel like visiting an art show. It feels like entering a body. Not just your own, but a collective one. The body of the memory, the diaspora, the secret self. The ghost note between the real and the imagined.

Sound isn’t just being re-imagined through innovative installations and digital immersion. Also in London, a quieter kind of multi-sensory experience is taking shape.

Jon Buck, Alarm Bells are Ringing, 2025 (Credit: Pangolin London)

On 9 July, Pangolin London hosts A Soirée of Music and Sculpture, an intimate evening where voice and form converge. Set within Telltale Forms, a retrospective celebrating four decades of work by sculptor Jon Buck, the evening blends a live artist talk with performances by The Working Consort (a London-based vocal collective, known for their improvisational approach to ensemble music). Buck’s work draws from mythology, nature, and the human form; the music answers not with explanation, but with atmosphere.

In contrast to the immersive scale of Feel the Sound, this event is minimal, acoustic, and immediate. A reminder that sometimes, the most affecting experiences come not from surround sound, but from a single, un-amplified voice in a room.

And perhaps that’s the point being made here. There is no single climax. No final song. No perfect silence. Only movement. Tension. Reverberation. And that’s exactly the point. Sound is not an object. It’s a condition. A way of being. And with these exhibitions, it becomes a question, too:
What if the function of sound was never to be heard, but to be felt?

If you enjoyed reading From Hearing to Feeling: The New Function of Sound, then why not read In The Absurd We Trust here

Barbican Centre, London (22 May – 31 August 2025).
Pangolin London, 9 July

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