Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Welcome to the Temi tour of Spectrum! If you are interested in participating in the tour please follow me! Equipped with five core tools - sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch - we make “sense” of the world around us. Each sense provides different information and gives us our own unique experiences, as we use that information to interpret our surroundings. Most of us go about our lives constantly using our senses without giving much thought to it. But what happens when we isolate each sense and start to pay attention? In SPECTRUM: The Five Senses, we want you to look, listen, taste, smell, and feel it all! What memories are evoked when you are confronted with certain scents? Does your mouth water when you look at sculptures of food, even when you know it isn’t edible? What sensations do you feel when you touch different textures? Is seeing believing? The Five Senses brings together the work of international, Canadian, and local artists, as well as some favourite THEMUSEUM interactive exhibits for a fun-filled, multisensory experience American poet Kenneth Rexroth once said that “art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.” Let the art in SPECTRUM: The Five Senses help YOU make sense of your world! Have fun interacting with all the installations and be sure to take the opportunity to run through a jungle of noodles that was designed by THEMUSEUM team! Enter through the Noodle Forest! Notice how your senses are heightened as you walk through! Touch Room Your skin is the largest organ in your body! It has millions of sensors that allow you to sense feelings in different ways, including pain, temperature, pressure, tickle, itch, and so on. Our sense of touch is controlled by a huge network of nerve endings and touch receptors that all work together to make up our somatosensory system. These send information about what we are touching back to our brains. The “feelings” we get through the sense of touch provide us with vital information, such as when we are hurt or wounded and may need medical attention, or when we feel cold, so we put on a sweater to maintain our internal body temperature. Some people experience what is known as Hypoesthesia, otherwise known as numbness or loss of sensation in response to touch, vibration or temperature. Touch is the first sense that human fetuses develop. Physical touch with other humans is mysteriously linked with early development, with multiple studies showing its importance in early life for developing cognitive function and an overall healthy body. The importance of physical human contact carries on throughout our lives. It is found to be the primary language of compassion and the primary means of spreading compassion. Our fingertips are incredibly sensitive to different textures. We can distinguish between coarse sandpaper and smooth glass, but also detect subtle differences in texture, such as between silk and cotton fabrics. Sensory Wall The sensory wall was designed by THEMUSEUM team that provides a tactile experience for visitors of all ages! Touch and feel all the different textures on the wall. How do the different textures feel? Try to describe how it feels. You’ll find there are many adjectives to describe textures. This variety of vocabulary affirms the rich sensorial experience that is touch! Bed of Nails On THEMUSEUM’s Bed of Nails, the nails slowly elevate to lift the visitor without harming them. Lying on the Bed of Nails does not cause pain because your weight is distributed over many nails. A nail requires about 2 kilograms of pressure to break the skin. However, because your body weight is distributed evenly, the result is an average pressure of only 0.04 kilograms per nail. Pressure is a function of surface area and force. A large force (such as your body weight) with a large area (such as your body) results in low pressure when you lie on the Bed of Nails. Sand Box Boko is a multidisciplinary design studio based in New Hamburg, Ontario. With a focus on creating interactive projects, playful furniture, and unique spaces, Boko is always looking for the next opportunity to make something incredible. Boko created the interactive animated sandbox! Viewers can play with the sand and alter the colours by creating peaks and valleys. Try it out for yourself! Explore how you can alter the colours on the topographic map as you move the sand around. Can you make it rain? Pixel Art Pixel art is a unique visual representation that uses pixels to define what an image is. Pixel art can be made by using many small circular or rectangular shapes! Have fun creating patterns and interacting with the lights to create your own artistic piece! Create a picture with 204 dots of light! A pixel is one of many tiny colour-changing dots in a digital screen. Each pixel has three lights inside: red, green and blue. Mixing red, green and blue light can create millions of colours! Turn any dial to start. About Sight What we “see” with our eyes is actually what we perceive with our brains. The highly complex system of our eyes is brilliantly able to convert light into the brain’s language of electrical signals. The only organ more complex than our eyes is the brain itself! Known as the Father of Optics, Ibn Al-Haytham c. 965 CE - c. 1040 CE is credited with being the first scientist to argue that vision occurs in the brain rather than the eyes. His work pointed out that personal experience affects how and what we see, and vision is therefore subjective. That means that even when we are looking at the same thing, our own personal experiences inform our perceptions and interpretations of what we see. As with our other senses, vision is tied to other parts of our brains, too. When we see and perceive what we are seeing, signals are also flowing back and forth instantaneously in our brains in regions where we store memory, govern emotion, make decisions, and initiate action. All this activity helps us to recognize, interpret, and react to what we see. For those with vision impairment or blindness, scientists have proven that structural changes take place in the brain, especially with the onset of blindness in early childhood. These structural changes appear to occur to compensate for the loss of one of their senses, resulting in a heightening of other senses. Concave Mirror The concave mirror reflects light inward toward a central location called the focal point. The image created from a concave mirror changes depending on your distance away from it. If you are standing behind the focal point, the light from the object (a.k.a. YOU!) is reflected off the mirror and the object is inverted (turned upside down). However, if you stand in front of the focal point, the light from the object is reflected but does not have the chance to be inverted and you appear normal. Try to find the exact location of the focal point. Can you reach out and shake your own hand? When you reach the focal point, your own image will disappear! Electric Playhouse Electric Playhouse was built with one big idea: play is important for everyone! In our immersive projection-based play arena you don’t need any VR goggles or silly hats to control the games around you. With our 18 interactive areas that change constantly, there’s something for everyone from “just mastered the tricycle” to “coolest grandma in town” Come out to play by yourself or in a group of any size! Sight is a visually stunning experience that leverages point clouds and depth data to enable guests to interact with virtual representations of themselves, family and friends. Written in JavaScript and WebGL, this custom exhibit transforms your body into a digital paintbrush without the need for wearable technology. Electric Playhouse is a STEAM powered interactive and visual arts studio. They are a team of artists, designers, software developers, architects, creative technologists and exhibit fabricators. They design experiences which invite visitors into immersive projection-mapped environments where they express themselves on digital canvases, exploring movement, colour and wonder. Electric Playhouse is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Scent Room Your sense of smell is made possible by your olfactory sensory neurons, which are specialized cells that connect directly to your brain. Each olfactory neuron has an odour receptor, which are stimulated by the microscopic molecules created by everything around us. When the neuron detects the molecule, it sends a message to your brain and identifies what you are smelling. Humans are actually pretty good smellers. Scientists used to believe that humans could only detect around 10,000 odours, but new research suggests a far greater number - some say as much as a trillion! This means that your nose outperforms your eyes and ears, which can distinguish between several million colours and about half a million tones. Do you find that some smells bring up specific memories or emotions? It’s not just you! Your sense of smell is directly connected to the limbic system, which is the part of your brain that regulates emotion. This connection between smell and your brain gives scents the power to evoke detailed, emotionally- charged memories and can even create feelings of nostalgia and longing. Anosmia is the partial or complete loss of smell. Many of us have likely experienced this when we have had a virus or cold. In some rare cases, people can actually be born without their sense of smell or lose this sense with age. These fragrances have the potential to trigger allergies and smell sensitivities, please be careful while interacting with these activities.