Visitors "playing the building" at David Byrne's installation in lower Manhattan, July 5, 2008.
Playing the Building involves an old organ console placed in the middle of a semi-abandoned ferry terminal with various actuators hooked up throughout the building. The structure itself -- its pipes, columns, and so on -- makes the actual sound, under the control of whoever is at the console. You can read more about it on davidbyrne.com. Anyone can go in and play the building for a few minutes at a time.
See http://www.crypto.com/blog/playing_the_building for more details about this recording.
This clip was recorded at the center of the main room, facing toward the organ console. There are occasional footsteps, people talking, children yelling and laughing, etc. (which, I think, could be considered part of the "performance"), but the dominant sound here is the building itself being played. The microphone perspective approximates being in the "audience". Recorded with a hand-held Nagra ARES-M with the green-band XY microphone.
Type
Wave (.wav)
Duration
11:47.000
File size
129.7 MB
Sample rate
48000.0 Hz
Bit depth
16 bit
Channels
Stereo
Comments
4 months, 1 week ago
There’s something deeply eerie yet mechanical about the rhythms at #2:45 — almost like the building is breathing through old lungs of iron and steam.
It’s wild how space becomes sound here.
Reminds me of how systems can function silently in the background until you play them.
That quiet complexity — it’s why I dig things like anonymous crypto swaps. No noise, no ID checks, just clean execution like this: https://cryptoswapnokyc.com/crypto-currency/usdt-xmr/
Let the infrastructure hum while you stay in control.
17 years, 2 months ago
Sounds very interesting! I would love to see and listen to this live!
