I’ve been spending a lot of time gathering new findings of intentionally unintended, random beauty from the school of experimental field recording lately. As a result, Xeni Jardin’s interview with David Byrne regarding his project, “Playing the Building” for BBTV naturally caught my attention when it wound through some friend’s sites over the past week.

Watch: Playing the Building (stills via the header)

Alhough the audio acoustics of Byrne’s Building are intentionally engineered and by definition more installation-based than field recording, the resultant environmental susceptibility certainly blurs the line between the two. Beautifully.

Straight jacked from Roy Christopher’s site, June 10th, 2008:

My favorite Talking Head, David Byrne, turns an entire old building in New York City into a giant sound machine in an installation called “Playing the Building.” Xeni Jardin takes a tour.

Under David’s manipulation, New York’s hundred-year-old Battery Maritime Building becomes a giant sound sculpture. He explains:

“Devices [have been] attached to the building’s structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate, and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.”

Read the full post at Roy’s site, soon to include the 2008 edition of his reknown, Summer Reading List.

via: Dave Allen / Roy Christopher / Xeni Jardin / David Byrne / Boing Boing

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