David Byrne Turns a Building into an Instrument

Starting May 31, New York’s Battery Maritime Building will be converted in to a giant sound installation. Playing the Building, created by David Byrne, takes the 1909 municipal ferry terminal and converts the basic infrastructure into a massive instrument for visitors to fiddle with.

Sitting in the middle of the room is a basic church organ—a little wooden one that looks well-worn. Visitors are invited to take a seat and bang away at the keys, which in turn ping, rattle, and blow air through the building’s columns, pipes, and girders through a series of low-tech cables and wires. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

According to Byrne:

I had an idea that these typical parts of buildings could be used to produce (interesting) sounds. Everyone is familiar with the fact that if you rap on a metal column, for example, you will hear a ping or a clang, but I wondered if the pipes could be turned into giant flutes, and if a machine could make some of the girders vibrate and produce tones. After thinking about how girders vibrate when a truck or a train goes over a metal bridge, it seemed just a matter of working out the mechanics of playing a building.

“I’d like to say that in a small way it turns consumers into creative producers,” Byrne explains on his official site, “but that might be a bit too much to claim. However, even if one doesn’t play the thing, it points toward a less mediated kind of cultural experience. It might be an experience in which one begins to reexamine one’s surroundings and to realize that culture — of which sound and music are parts — doesn’t always have to be produced by professionals and packaged in a consumable form.

Playing the Building