It’s a bit of a paradox. The Science Museum has been collecting musical instruments for 150 years because of the sounds they can make, and yet often they are silent when on display.
Last year we invited visitors to see and hear some of these instruments in our Turn It Up exhibition, and the latest opportunity is the Time Loops musical performances taking place at the Science Museum in London on 6 February and at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford on 15 March.
Sound is very much the focus for Time Loops, where a variety of musical instruments and technologies will be introduced through the skilled handling of musicians from the ensemble Icebreaker. Lasting just over an hour , this ‘exhibition’ has three ‘rooms’, each composed (or curated) by a leading composer – Gavin Bryars, Shiva Feshareki, and Sarah Angliss – with immersive audio design provided by d&b audiotechnik’s amazing Soundscape system. The whole event has its origins in a workshop series where musicians, curators and academics debated the role of sound in museums.
The Science Museum Group Collection holds instruments as varied as concertinas and vintage synths, samplers that once cost as much as a house, and DIY electro-acoustic instruments, including the ShoZyg, invented by electronic music pioneer Hugh Davies.

In ShoZyg Revisited, part of the Time Loops performances, Gavin Bryars returns to the musical technologies of his early career in the 1960s and ‘70s, when he composed his internationally celebrated pieces The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.
Treating himself as a ‘museum piece’ by exploring his practice from that time, he is reanimating his use of tape loops alongside four ShoZygs, made for the project by specialists linked to the Electronic Music Studio (EMS) at Goldsmiths, founded by Hugh Davies himself. Two of these will then be processed through a rare VCS3 and the unique VCS4 analogue synthesizer, developed in this period, and provided here by Goldsmiths and digitana electronics.

The VCS4 also features in Shiva Feshareki’s ‘room’, for which she has also used the project name Time Loops, where the audio technology in question is three Space Echoes, kindly loaned to the project.
Introduced by the Roland Corporation in 1974, these instruments provide an array of tape delay effects widely used across reggae, dub, avant-rock and other genres. Shiva’s installation performance uses this technology together with the immersive audio system to transform perceptions of time and space.
Sarah Angliss’s Copicat turns our attention to this affordable, portable tape-echo machine, designed by London engineer Charlie Watkins in 1958.
Available on the high street, the Copicat gave musicians access to a howl-infused sound-palette previously only available in rarefied electronic music studios. Angliss also uses fragments of an interview with Watkins and, like Bryars, returns to her own history as a former assistant curator at the Science Museum. Inspired by objects like the museum’s carillon, she went on to build her own polyphonic carillon, which features in her ‘room’ for our ‘exhibition’.

Time Loops promises to be an incredible evening, when the museum’s Information Age gallery will be brought alive to the sounds that objects in the collection might make.
The Time Loops performance at the Science Museum has sold out, with tickets available soon for the performance at the National Science and Media Museum. Find our more about the wider Time Loops project here.