Composer David Cunningham is perhaps the only person to ever conceive a half-way credible “answer” to the questions raised by John Cage’s classic composition 4’33” (which is no small feat). Over roughly the last ten years, Cunningham has created simple, interactive installations which microphone and amplify the background room tone and unnoticeable noises of indoor and outdoor public spaces (documented here), feeding the sound of the space (quiet or otherwise) back to itself and bringing the sounds only our subconscious usually notice to the foreground – all of it mixing into a kind of undefinable loop. His latest installation A Piano in a Gallery, at Carter Presents in London (July 2nd-Aug 6th), takes the concept further; feeding the unnoticeable sounds of an open gallery room back into itself, and also onto the strings of a piano placed in the gallery’s center – with the sound of the space in turn kind of “playing” the instrument, which then becomes the sound of the room and so on and so on (really, inverting the process of how a piano amplifies sound). The piece runs at the space until August 6th. More info about A Piano in a Gallery can be found here.

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