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Signposts on Karntnerstrasse point east to the Haus der Musik (daily 10am-10pm; www.haus-der-musik-wien.at ; oS110/?7.99), a hugely enjoyable new attraction down Annagasse in the newly revamped headquarters of the Wiener Philharmoniker (Vienna Philharmonic). On the first floor is a museum dedicated to this world-famous orchestra, which only allowed women to join its ranks in 1996. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find, on the second floor, a startling, state-of-the-art exhibition on the nature of sound, filled with high-tech installations. To get you into the mood, the walls of the first, bare room you enter, vibrate with synthesized prenatal sounds. After a brief rundown on the biology of the ear, you enter the "laboratory of perception", where a bank of beautifully designed touch-screen computers explore human responses to frequency, volume and so on. Elsewhere on this floor, you can watch and stretch the sound waves created by your own voice and play around with prerecorded sounds in the dimly-lit "sea of voices" room. On the third floor, the subject is more conventional, with a room to each of the big three classical composers - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - as well as one each dedicated to Schubert, Strauss, Mahler and Schonberg's modernist posse. The displays are a whole lot more imaginative than all the city's other musical memorials put together. There's plenty of hands-on fun and games: you can isolate each of the parts to Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik , have a virtual tour of musically significant parts of Vienna, and do some virtual conducting. There's yet more musical tomfoolery upstairs in the Brain Opera, where you can create your own music on the Gesture Wall, the Rhythm Tree, and finally via a sophisticated visual computer bank of sounds.
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