Wild Music Appearing in Tadem With Geckos!
The National Geographic Museum will be hosting a special 2-for-1 exhibit opening this fall. Wild Music is a natural companion to the Geckos exhibit.
From tiny insects to giant whales, nature is filled with creatures that create distinct musical masterpieces to communicate with and relate to one another. “Wild Music: Sounds & Songs for Life” invites visitors to engage in hands-on activities to explore how different animals form their sounds and inspire music around the globe.
Visitors will be encouraged to not only hear the music that surrounds them every day, but to see and feel it too. Among the exhibition’s highlights is the “Pictures of Sound” section in which visitors discover how sound patterns look by learning to read spectrograms that show the frequency of song changes over time. In the “Jamming Room,” a soundproof practice studio, visitors can play and compose songs using pre-recorded audio soundscapes, touch-activated Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) instruments and animal voices, acoustic percussion instruments and live vocals. In the “Underwater Microphone” section, visitors explore how sound is transmitted underwater as they experiment with a hydrophone in a water-filled tank and listen to mechanisms such as a bubbler, trolling motor and ratchet.
Admission to “Wild Music” is free. The exhibition is a production of the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Association of Science-Technology Centers and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Music, with major support from the National Science Foundation and additional support from Harman International Inc. and the NEC Foundation of America.
