Piano Listening To Itself

Gordon Monahan (1) is a Canadian musician and artist that primarily performs through installation art. When I heard the sound of his installation titled 'Piano Listening To Itself' it immediately struck a chord with me (pun optional). We were listening to a CBC radio 2 program called 'In Concert' (2) in the background of a gray Sunday morning when one of the most hauntingly beautiful sounds I'd ever heard was played. It sounded like the ghost of a concert pianist was giving a performance in what ever distant dimension they occupied and through some freakish rift in space-time we were allowed to listen in.

When I looked up the installation on the interweb it was as visually stunning as it was mechanically brilliant (pictured above). The photo is taken from the CBC's In Concert website and it does a much better job of explaining the concept than I am about to attempt to do.

In a courtyard in Warsaw, Monahan placed a grand piano and removed its strings. He then strung piano wire from the sound board of the piano to the clock tower high above the courtyard. The mechanical brilliance comes in the form of his physics. Monahan attached tiny motors to the clock tower which were programmed to transfer a recording of a Chopin piano concerto into a vibration along the strings (much like a speaker sends music through the air as a vibration of the molecules in the air). The sound board of the piano then transfers the vibrations propagated through the strings to the air where anyone within earshot can hear it. The result is a piano playing a piano from a distance of over a hundred yards. The youtube video has some audio of the piano but I can't find a recording of the original sound bite I heard on the radio. I can only hope this installation comes to Toronto at some point in the future.





1. http://www.gordonmonahan.com/
2. http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/saic/2010/09/26/teutonic-titans-and-a-high-strung-piano/