Playing the Building by David Byrne

Just ran across this and wanted to share it.

From Wikipedia's article on David Byrne: In 2008, Byrne and his production team programmed the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old ferry terminal in Manhattan, to play music. Essentially Byrne took the old New York City building, hooked the entire structure - pipes, heaters, pillars and all, electronically to an old pipe organ, and made a playable musical instrument of it, for a piece called "Playing the Building".

How cool is THAT?!

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R

Reply to
RicodJour
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It's a cool idea alright but I'd like to have heard him play something. Something recognizable - like Life During Wartime. Art

Reply to
Artemus

Is this Phase Two of More Songs about Buildings and Food? Marc (who had a pleasant meeting with David Byrne back in 1979 or 80)

Reply to
marc rosen

Elaborate please.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

Hey Rico, The secong album by the Talking Heads is titled "More Songs about Buildings and Food". I also thought I'd make my own Frank Zappa reference with the quip "Is this phase two.......?" (For those Lumpy Gravy/Money perusers)

If you want me to elaborate about meeting Byrne, I was working (volunteering) at a college radio station and one of the other DJs was a close friend of his so he was invited to hang out for an evening. Nice time, can't recall too much of what was said. Marc

Reply to
marc rosen

David Byrne said that as a youth he was probably borderline Asperger's, and I think that ability to obsess about things, and the ability to create from that obsession, is what makes an artist and artist.

No problem - some of the best nights I ever had were a bit foggy afterward...and after some I was also pretty damned sore. ;)

R
Reply to
RicodJour

It's pretty cool the way he has it set up, although he could always get the band to do a live performance with the audience in the middle of the room. :)

I may have mentioned on here quite a long time ago something about the idea of a band that moves around the room and the audience, maybe on foot or even on some kind of film "dolly-track", so that the music fluctuates and shifts in experience over time...

I bang on bus-stop windows and parts thereof sometimes when I get bored waiting for the bus. Large glass windows can have a nice bass sound when you bump them in the middle with the side of your fist, and the metal components can sound nice (metallic snare when coupled with the window's bass) when flicked with a finger-nail.

Someone mentioned Frank Zappa, and there's a bit of him on tv "playing a bike", which I've also done when I once happened upon Montreal's:

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vid says 2007 and the time I was there was around the early 90's, so they're still keeping up the tradition.

Zappa:

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Reply to
Warm Worm

In the old Delta blues tradition of the "diddley bow," a one stringed lap slide guitar, several musicians have made instruments by stretching baling wire across houses.

Reply to
Father Haskell

Interesting. Were the wires attached to the walls and the walls acted as the drum skin?

R
Reply to
RicodJour

While walking today I thought of a large pipe, about 3' dia x 12' long, with identical 12" full range drivers mounted along the side of that pipe, evenly spaced apart, the far end of the pipe would be capped off so the sound would come out one end only. Then send a single identical signal to each of the drivers at the same time. Would the driver at the far end of the pipe have a lower sound then the driver mounted closest to the open end of the pipe? If so, would that then be a full range speaker?

What if, at the far end of the pipe, rather than a cap, a U was installed, then another length of pipe, kinda like a folded horn. Would this add volume?

Spring must be coming, I'm itching to make stuff.

Reply to
creative1986

Yup. I'm thinking of replacing my doorbell with one.

Reply to
Father Haskell

Now that's interesting! I suppose if the diaphragm was big enough the tone would be very low hertz and vibrate your internal organs (are there external organs? Don's answer that!).

R
Reply to
RicodJour

I had the impression that wires were attached to nails in the walls (outside). I went browsing and all I came up with were electric ones on YouTube. Anyone have a link to a version of an acoustic one? Maybe they just don't make 'em like they used to?

Bill

Reply to
Bill

I've never met Mr. Bryne, but I did attend one of their Stop Making Sense tour stops, the tour that the movie was made from.

We live a pretty conservative area, so selling out a large arena for the Talking Heads wasn't going to happen. Instead, they cut the local War Memorial in half, creating a horseshoe shaped arena that was packed with about 8000 raucous fans.

I used to live in NYC and attended lots of concerts at MSG, Central Park, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fillmore East, The Meadowlands, etc.

The Stop Making Sense concert ranks amongst the top few concerts that I've ever attended.

Reply to
DerbyDad03

Whgat if you had a gig on the road? Hard to get that building into a van.

Reply to
tmurpha1hi

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