silence organ

silence organ consoleNexus Gallery in Philadelphia commissioned the Silence Organ for Innovative Instruments, a show of artists’ instruments presented in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Citycircus, a celebration of John Cage.

To exploit rooms full of interesting instruments making interesting noises, I wired the gallery with 13 microphones, each set in a resonating tube tuned to a note of the diatonic scale. The viewer would put on headphones and play a tune on an antique keyboard, in which each note was made of filtered sound from elsewhere in the gallery.