Illuminations Interactive was selected by the Horniman Museum in South London to design and produce the touch-screens for The Music Room, an exhibition of Musical Instruments which opened in Autumn 1993.











The 16 interactive touch-screens were dynamic alternatives to text and graphic display panels, enabling visitors both to find out more about and to listen to the sounds made by the more than one thousand musical instruments on display. The screen aesthetic deliberately included images of the musical instruments which are dimmer than their real counterparts in the adjacent cases. This was designed to encourage a positive relationship between the objects and the interactive works where the object was the most prominent.

One of the sixteen works was an interactive exploration of the horn, detailing the physics of sound generation, its construction and a historical explanation of the gradual addition of valves. This featured specially recorded footage of horn expert Tony Halstead.