[art] Playing the Building
Friday, September 4th, 2009 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthWent to the Roundhouse last week with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
major_clanger to see experience the David Byrne installation, Playing the Building.
It was weird.
Basically, each key of an old-fashioned pump organ is attached to a tube, a hammer or a motor: pressing the key makes Noise, somewhere in the space around one.
But the noises were pretty much random -- a key always produced the same note, but there was none of this low-to-high left-to-right pitch, no octaves, no scales. Deconstructing the Western musical tradition! It was ... disconcerting.
Given a lot longer I'd probably have experimented a lot more, but even on a Wednesday there was a queue (though not a long one) and quite a few children, who I think enjoyed the experience more than the adults -- perhaps because of having fewer expectations of what happens when you hit keys on a keyboard.
Great for people-watching, but not precisely musical except in the most random and ephemeral sense.
major_clanger's write-up is more detailed.
major_clanger to It was weird.
Basically, each key of an old-fashioned pump organ is attached to a tube, a hammer or a motor: pressing the key makes Noise, somewhere in the space around one.
But the noises were pretty much random -- a key always produced the same note, but there was none of this low-to-high left-to-right pitch, no octaves, no scales. Deconstructing the Western musical tradition! It was ... disconcerting.
Given a lot longer I'd probably have experimented a lot more, but even on a Wednesday there was a queue (though not a long one) and quite a few children, who I think enjoyed the experience more than the adults -- perhaps because of having fewer expectations of what happens when you hit keys on a keyboard.
Great for people-watching, but not precisely musical except in the most random and ephemeral sense.
major_clanger's write-up is more detailed.
