After establishing itself on the world stage as a regional hub for classical music and opera, the Royal Opera House Muscat has unveiled its latest addition: the House of Musical Arts. This extension is part of the burgeoning opera district, which includes traditional arts and crafts stores.

The interactive exhibits tell the entire story of sound and music starting with the sound of the heartbeat heard by an unborn child, explaining how sound is heard, the characteristics of musical notes (volume, pitch and timbre), how notes are combined into scales to make tunes, how those tunes are arranged incorporating rhythm and beat and how all of that comes together to create music.

The physical interactives propose to demonstrate difficult principles of musicality to a very wide audience, the aim is to make those principles easy to understand in an engaging and accessible way. Our role has been to support the design team with our technical knowledge to develop the exhibits not only into aesthetically beautiful items but also to accurately demonstrate musical principles, all whilst being reliable and able to withstand unsupervised use by visitors.

We undertook three months of full scale prototyping in order to test the design principle fully before committing to the build. Our prototyping allows the client to approve the designs and enable them to move forward confidently into production which is essential as all the exhibits are being produced in exceptionally high end materials so there is no room for error.

Our works are ‘plug and play’ and will fit into extensive set works supplied by an Oman based fit out contractor, Al Tasnim. To ensure coordination of works, we have held weekly coordination meetings which include participation from 59 Productions, ourselves, the Royal Palace Team and Al Tasnim.

The exhibition contains some of the finest work our team has ever produced, it was a challenge we have risen to and the final interactive exhibits are astounding.