The country’s first museum that will let visitors ‘experience’ music is taking shape in the city.
Feel the music. That's what the Centre for Indian Music Experience hopes visitors will be able to do at the country's first experiential music museum when it opens in November 2012. Thus, the museum will have not just installations but also multimedia galleries, performance and learning spaces, and interactive exhibits. Visitors can listen to various tracks and touch the interactive installations.
“While a traditional 'collection-based' museum encapsulates the idea that the soul of a museum is its collection and therein lies its identity, an experiential museum represents the idea that the visitor is central, and the museum's function is that of a catalyst in an intensely personal and transformational experience,” says Manasi Prasad, head of the music project at real estate developer Brigade Group.
The museum is a non-profit initiative supported by the realty firm and will come up on a 1-acre plot in the Brigade Millennium enclave in south Bangalore. Prasad herself is an artiste, a Carnatic music vocalist and the recipient of the the Bismillah Khan Award instituted by the government.
The focus of the museum is to showcase the country's rich culture of music, by encouraging a rediscovery of its various genres from the traditional to the contemporary. So its music gallery will display 250 instruments from across the country, including many tribal instruments. The museum will also have a sound garden, with installations like large wind chimes suspended from trees, musical stepping stones and tubular bells to engage visitors, and a mini theatre.
While India has two interactive museums — the Gandhi Museum in Delhi and the Museum of Energy in Ahmedabad — CIME will be the country's first experiential museum, though there are several abroad. The closest in comparison would be the $300-million Experience Music Project in Seattle in the US. The Seattle project has been set up on a 140,000-square feet space and explores creativity and innovation in popular music. It also blends interpretative, interactive exhibition with cutting-edge technology. The Bangalore museum hopes to do something similar on a 40,000-square foot space.
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The idea for the project, which is expected to cost several crores, took shape over the past year, says Prasad. To execute the plan, the trust has appointed Gallaghar & Associates which specialises in planning, design and management of experiences for museums . The firm has previously worked with the Recording Academy to create the Grammy Museum — a 30,000-square foot museum dedicated to the history, art and technology of recorded music. The architect of the museum, Architecture Paradigm, was chosen through an architecture design contest. “One can traverse all the galleries in a continuous path, without the need to backtrack,” the jury had opined.
The project also has the involvement of several experts such as renowned vocalist Shubha Mudgal and Shubha Chaudhuri, the director of the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology of the American Institute of Indian Studies, (ARCE) a major archive of music and oral traditions of India.