David Byrne - Playing the Building

David Byrne has found a creative use for New York City's Battery - Maritime Building:

Playing the building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

Byrne invites visitors to play this instrument, using the keyboard of an antique organ:

It might be an experience in which one begins to reexamine one's surroundings and to realize that culture—of which sound and music are parts—doesn't always have to be produced by professionals and packaged in a consumable form.

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down. The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

We could use that kind of thinking in Detroit. What if our historic buildings were neither left to rot, nor torn down for parking, but were instead used to encourage creativity? What if our streets were not only filled with the dust of the past, and the traffic of the present, but also the music of the future?