LSO Play

An interactive music experience and education tool that reached more than half a million visitors. Classical music is inspiring and relevant, with a rich history and a vibrant seam of contemporary arrangements. However audiences are dwindling; in the last year less than 8% of adults in the UK attended a classical performance, and of that small slice less than 7% were aged under 30. Radical ideas are needed to reconnect us with the art form. The London Symphony Orchestra has the mission to ‘Make the finest music available to the greatest number of people’, and so they are pushing to turn some of these ideas into reality. The LSO had recorded high definition video of classical music performances from multiple viewpoints, but had no clear vision for how to leverage these terrific assets. The LSO asked Sennep to help, and we proposed putting the view of the orchestra in the user’s hands as the performance plays. The interface gives the user the controls to switch camera angles and to view multiple perspectives at once. To reach a younger audience we were keen to augment this with an educational layer; the solution we created was a comprehensive visualisation of the orchestra, allowing a wide range of content to be catalogued by instrument. LSO Play has been used as an educational resource as part of KS2 learning, with over 600,000 visits to the site – a substantial step towards the mission of the London Symphony Orchestra.