Sonic Vision: How We See Music

When I first heard that the American Museum of Natural History had a visual music show, I immediately thought back to the dazed & confused kids from high school who would declare that the Pink Floyd laser show had changed their lives. So when my friend told me that she had loved Sonic Vision, I was a little skeptical. But then Joanne, the editor of Under The Microscope, told me that she had managed to score free tickets for me to see the show. How could I pass up free?

So I trekked to the Upper West Side of Manhattan to check it out. Walking into the Space Theater, I overheard an older man asking his wife, "Is this supposed to be educational?"

"It's supposed to experiential," she replied.

Experiential it was.

Sonic Vision is way more than a laser light show – it's an all-embodying musical experience. Combining a soundtrack hand-picked by Moby with trippy 3-D animations, it's easy to get lost in the moment and feel like you're on a rollercoaster that is spinning through space. For anyone who hasn't been to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the planetarium is a wonder in itself – a seven-story white orb that seems to float in the building. But the theater felt like a rocketship during Sonic Vision.

Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place" started the show with digital effects making it look and feel like we were blasting into space. The next 30 minutes sent us tumbling through wormholes in space, into alien temples, and past a blue talking head surrounded by tribal masks with songs by Coldplay, U2, The Flaming Lips, Prodigy, and more.

Even though Sonic Vision has passed its 5th anniversary, it fails to feel outdated – with a couple exceptions. At one point, the show hailed the rave period with robots dancing and shaking sparkling glow sticks. Also, the visualizations sometimes looked similar to those that I could watch on my computer. However, my computer screen can't do what SonicVision did – make me lose myself in the experience. The planetarium even had some kind of rumbling mechanism on the seats that made it actually feel like large space objects were barely missing us as we flew by them. The effect felt so real that I would warn anyone who easily gets motion sickness to be prepared for slight nausea.

Music affects us in all in different ways. Most of the visualizations didn't represent how I see music, but they still managed to transfix me. At some moments it was a rollercoaster ride; at other times it was a thought-provoking triumph. My favorite point in the show was during David Bowie's "Heroes," when archival footage and photographs of families and events floated by us - a reference to how music makes us remember the past.

As I left, I overheard an eleven-year-old girl say, "I had to remind myself we were on the ground!" After the show, it was hard to come back to Earth.

For more information, click here.
To view the trailer, click here.