The brief
Turn It Up: The Power of Music was a major exhibition for the Science Museum Group, shown at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester and then the Science Museum in London. It set out to let visitors make music, not just read about it. For the exhibition’s music-making area, the museum wanted an open-ended, immediately reactive interactive where families could explore pitch, tempo and timbre by hand, robust enough to run all day, unsupervised, in a national museum.
What we did
Music Maker was the first public exhibit powered by our AI music-sequencing platform, the engine that went on to become BeatBlocks Live. Visitors moved DUPLO bricks around a large mat and the exhibit turned them into music in real time, reading the bricks through a camera, with no notation and nothing to plug in.
The engineering was in making an iOS app survive a museum. We adapted the software to run headless on a Mac Mini built into the exhibit, hardened it for long days of heavy public use, drove the physical buttons and lighting, and worked with the exhibition’s sound designers so the piece sat well against everything playing around it. We delivered it with the Science Museum Group’s team and the exhibit fabricator, through prototype, visitor testing, install and sign-off.
What happened
Turn It Up ran in Manchester and then London, where its run was extended to September 2024 after beating its visitor forecast. The exhibition drew more than 110,000 visitors across the two venues, and over 130 press features in London alone, from BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, which called it “a toe-tapping, foot-stomping new exhibition”, to the Guardian, “a fascinating show”.
The Science Museum also collected an original Skoog, our founders’ accessible instrument, and showed it in the exhibition under the heading “Music for everyone”.
A Music Teacher magazine reviewer described Music Maker capturing the imagination of the five-year-old he brought with him, then going looking for the technology afterwards.