★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
House of Music
This museum's virtual orchestra judges your conducting—flub your moves and ensemble members make dismissive comments. Tucked on Seilerstätte 30 in Vienna's first district, the House of Music spans 54,000 square feet across four floors of interactive exhibits. Entering the space, you immediately face the sound staircase—13 motion-sensitive steps functioning as piano keys, each step illuminating its note on the wall above. Descend deeper to the Virtual Conductor exhibit, where motion-sensing technology reads your hand gestures in real time, letting you control the filmed Vienna Philharmonic. The exhibits explore acoustics to Beethoven's hearing loss, but the most Viennese experience comes from composing your own waltz by rolling virtual dice—a compositional method Mozart and Haydn genuinely used centuries ago.
Did You Know?
- : The House of Music in Vienna stands on the very site where Otto Nicolai founded the world-famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1842, making it the literal birthplace of one of the most celebrated orchestras in history.
- The museum is housed in the former Palais Archduke Karl, a building with a rich past that once served as a royal foundry, a pawn shop for the wealthy, and even a student cultural center, with its striking Baroque facade and iron balconies added in 1872.
- Visitors can try composing their own waltz using a digital 'dice game' inspired by a historical method once used by Mozart and Haydn, who created melodies by rolling dice to determine musical phrases—a playful nod to Viennese musical creativity.