Feel the Sound at the Barbican cranks up the volume

30 May 2025, The Tablet

Ciarán Wood

Feel the Sound at the Barbican Centre, London

Sound is an aggressor when you live in a city. It invades buses and trains in a shriek of TikTok videos and phone calls, pushes into our homes in the whir of the bin lorry, the bang and screech of our neighbour’s building work. It swells in restaur­ants, rustles and coughs in church. A new exhibition at the Barbican Centre promises to “transform how we think about sound” – but it ends up just adding to the noise.

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