Museum of the Future - 2017

Government Summit in Dubai

As in 2015 and 2016, we created the music and sound design for this year's Museum of the Future in Dubai. The exhibition addresses the reality of climate change and presents a future where we have not only survived the challenges of climate change in the mid-21st century, but have thrived. The exhibit emphasises the inevitability of major environmental change and the importance of being proactive and able to adapt. For the centerpiece of the museum, a 360 degree film, Idee und Klang produced an immersive soundtrack using an Auro-11.1 setup with additional floor speakers and multiple shakers built into the floor. All in all more than 80 speakers were used in the different areas, fusing a unique audio experience with the museum's impressive visual content. 

In this year’s exhibit we heavily relied on generative sound design and composition techniques. On interactive stations throughout the museum, visitors could build their own cities or give their opinions on how to best tackle the environmental challenges ahead. Sonic feedback to their input was designed to both represent the specific user action (eg. a button press) as well as its semantic / emotional content (eg. growing sustainable cities in a barren wasteland). Ambient and interaction sound was weaved into each other, allowing the visitors to actively enrich the sonic environments by adding harmonic layers and setting musical accents. 

More about immersive audio here.
More about generative audio design here.

Credits

The Museum of the Future at the 2017 World Government Summit is supported by the Dubai Future Foundation and the UAE telecommunications giant du. It was led by the Foundation's team and directed by the global design firm Tellart, with the support of an international team of top partners including Marshmallow Laser FeastSOFTlabSpacehabs, Idee und Klang Audio Design, Lust, Cropbox and Shtik. The onsite build and installation was done in collaboration with Projex, Neumann & MüllerHypsos and PublicisLive. Foresight research and workshop facilitation was performed by Scott Smith (Changeist).