Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa, a landmark homegrown exhibition on New Zealand music will open at Auckland War Memorial Museum on October 28.

In partnership with the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, Volume is the first major exhibition to tell the story of popular music in Aotearoa.

From Pokarekare ana to Poi e, from Loyal to Royals, from dance halls to DJs and from vinyl to mp3s and back again, Volume will take visitors on a musical journey through the decades from the 1950s to today.

Punters will get to experience how music has been made, heard, and performed over the past 60 years in a ‘hands on, ears on’ exhibition, exploring the diverse, unique sounds that come from NZ.

Visitors will be able to step into a recording studio and get behind the mixing desk, become a DJ and blend music and video, browse records in a 1980s record store, learn how to play the opening riff of an iconic Kiwi song, or step back in time and on to the set of C’mon in the 1960s.

The exhibition will also feature costumes, awards, hand-written lyrics, instruments, memorabilia, and hundreds of images that showcase the music that provides the soundtrack to our lives.

Volume has been developed in partnership with the NZ Music Hall of Fame, whose trustees are Recorded Music New Zealand and the Australasian Performing Right Association NZ (APRA), organisations which represent artists and songwriters from across Aotearoa.

Auckland Museum also has the support of Spark to take the exhibition to new heights with technology.

Volume opens Friday 28 October and is open until 22 May 2017 in the Special Exhibitions Hall.