Start To Push / Break Your Own Glass Ceiling

Ken Unsworth is an Australian artist who specializes in installation and sculpture works. "I'm not worried about meaning," he said in one interview. "I just like to make these strange things." Strange and often musical - turns out his late wife, an inspiration for many of his pieces, was a pianist. Examples A and B: "Rapture" (for piano, straw, burnt sheet music, and plastic mice) is a sculpture made of keyboard-stairs, and "Piano Trio (Teaching Three Pianos to Sing in Unison)" involves three grand pianos, motorized parts, three metronomes, and sheet music.

And then I give you Example C: Unsworth's 2009 exhibit "A Ringing Glass (Rilke)" includes an installation with twenty-eight toy pianos (I counted) suspended from the ceiling. The Schoenhut tinkle starts at 4:45, but the whole video is worth watching: even in the installations dealing with, oh you know, humanity and life and death and things, sound and music play a huge role:

Joy To The Fishes In The Deep Blue Sea

Quiet Ensemble (founded by Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli in 2009) seeks to "compose sounds out of the most casual movements of the "invisible concerts" of everyday life." Practically, that means their installation "Quintetto" is a five-aquarium affair complete with video cameras that first capture the fishy movements (also the not-suspicious movements - ha! okay.) and then send the information to computers that translate movement into sound.

Quintetto by Quiet Ensemble from yatzer on Vimeo.

(via notcot)

You Light Up My Life

Michael Vorfeld is a German percussionist. And this is his sound installation. The lights go on, the lights go off; they pop and flash and ding - and we get music-sound.



Sound installations. How fascinating! I think I'll spend the rest of my life studying them.

(via neatorama)