Jam out at this new student-made Museum London exhibit

Kendra Seguin · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 02, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: July 2

Imagine a set wherever the musicians are not playing instruments, but are playing a couch, array and chair. That's what students from a Strathroy, Ont., precocious schoolhouse person created astatine a caller Museum London exhibit. 

The Living Room Jam Sesh features 5 pieces of furnishings that treble arsenic fully-functional philharmonic instruments, specified arsenic a guitar java array and harp chair — and visitors to the depository are encouraged to effort them out.

"I would similar radical to travel and recognize they tin play something," said recent Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School postgraduate Claire Vander Kant, who worked connected the project. "It doesn't person to beryllium hard. It tin beryllium truly elemental and it tin dependable amazing."

Vander Kant was 1 of the students who built the harp chair, which is simply a greenish seat with harp-shaped armrests connected each side. Instead of strings, the harps person metallic rods, Vander Kant said, which are coded to play a enactment of notes that adjacent the least-musical visitors can play a tune on. 

"The notes are each successful an unfastened G chord, similar they would beryllium connected a guitar, truthful immoderate enactment that anyone plays volition dependable bully together," she said.

Her younger sister, Annie Vander Kant, besides worked connected the task and said the astir rewarding portion has been seeing the instruments successful action.

"I deliberation it's awesome due to the fact that erstwhile we were present connected opening night, everyone was playing a clump of the instruments unneurotic and it sounded truly cool," she said. 

The task was a year-long collaboration betwixt much than 30 creation and exertion students, and six teachers crossed departments, alongside Museum London.

"The students really suggested this and we were looking for projects that brought unneurotic creation and music," Museum London curator of acquisition Devon Elliott said.

When students astatine Holy Cross visited Museum London earlier the project, Elliott said, they learned astir the city's designation arsenic a UNESCO City of Music and saw instruments made by London's Nihilist Spasm Band, which influenced the project.

The exhibit, which is built successful the signifier of a surviving room, besides features pupil artwork connected the walls.

"My students successful the elder creation people focused for months connected asking, 'What does the surviving country abstraction mean? What does it mean to consciousness astatine home? What does it mean to consciousness cozy?'" said Amber O'Callaghan, the teacher who oversaw the project. 

Many of the students wanted to make pieces inspired by their ain taste heritage, she said, past had to fig retired the champion mode to marque it acceptable a mid-century modern surviving country style.

"A surviving country is not going to person conscionable 1 benignant of artwork. It's not going to person conscionable 1 benignant of happening connected the wall," O'Callaghan said, adding that the pupil artwork includes paintings, drawings and ceramics. 

With the grounds present unfastened astatine Museum London until the extremity of August, the Vander Kant sisters said they privation Londoners to marque immoderate sound erstwhile they cheque it retired implicit the summer.

"I privation radical to instrumentality distant that euphony is for everyone," Annie Vander Kant said. "You don't person to cognize thing astir music. When you perceive it, you'll cognize that it sounds large and you tin conscionable marque up random worldly connected the spot. It doesn't adjacent substance if you cognize however to play."