Throughout the spring, ¼” and XLR level ESS members have the incredible opportunity to experience “Living Room Pieces”: A sound installation designed to live with you in your home.

“Sound is a presence. It’s an intrusive, all-encompassing presence that can go through walls, through vents, and I knew that if I made a sound installation for the home, it needed to take this into account.”

- Michael J. Schumacher

Image Description: Two large black speakers are placed on either side of a small single-board Raspberry Pi computer in a black case.

Created by Brooklyn-based composer and sonic artist Michael J. Schumacher, “Living Room Pieces” is one of the only sound installations created for domestic spaces.

About Living Room Pieces

“Living Room Pieces is a sound installation that explores listening in the home - its special modes and attributes — reinventing the living space as a place of engagement and discovery. You set it up and start it and occasionally, unexpectedly, it makes sounds, always in different ways. Its huge inventory of sounds and the unpredictability of their occurrence create a listening environment that transforms one’s relationship to physical, architectural, social and aural space. Sounds from the installation interact with a room’s ambience; their timing and placement reinforce a listener’s sense of being “in the moment” — aware, attentive, resilient.

Living Room Pieces is a computer-generated, multichannel, long-form composition. Its structure is built on rules — for timing, for various types of signal processing, for spatialization — executed in “real time,” that create continuous change while maintaining the sense of a single, unifying, purposeful idea. On the one hand, every sounding moment is unique, never to occur again, on the other, the algorithms have a consistency that suggests, reassuringly, an underlying organizational intent. The composition’s form, in the broadest sense, is a seven day repeating cycle, instantiated each time the software is launched. In theory, this need only happen once, as the piece will run without interruption for as long as there’s power to the system.”

Photo description: A collage image of two different Raspberry Pi computers. One is in a shiny, silver aluminum case with bold text that reads, “Living Room Pieces Michael J. Schumacher Edition of 5 - March 2022.” The other Raspberry Pi is in a matte, black case that reads, “Living Room Pieces Michael J. Schumacher Edition of 18 - March 2021.”

Interview Transcript

Friday, April 1, 2022 in Chicago, IL

How did you learn to use programming for composition/sound art?

I started working with computers when I was at Juilliard in the 1980s. Before that I had used synthesizers — Buchla, Moog — and tape. A friend lent me his Commodore 64 and I immediately took to it. Though I was not a programmer, I liked that you could have an idea and program the computer to make it happen all at once, blooming like a flower. Unlike tape multi-tracking.

I took a course with Barry Vercoe in CSound at MIT, but what really got me into the computer was MIDI, because it was “real time”. I wasn’t really programming, I was using the computer to perform pieces from processes that I worked out with pencil and paper. At some point, about 1988, I walked into Manny’s Music on West 48th Street in New York and went to their tiny software department to see if there was anything new, anything interesting. Some guy who looked like one of the Ramones – you know, long black hair, wearing sunglasses – gave me a big 3-ring binder that said Opcode MAX on it. It was all graphical and reminded me of working with modular synths, so I thought this is something I can actually learn and use to generate the algorithms I’d been manually working out in a sequencer. Eventually, at Engine 27, I met Luke DuBois, Dafna Naphtali and Matty Ostrowski, who could actually program, and they taught me a lot.

I know you primarily identify as a composer, but you also identify as a sonic artist. How do you see these two identities at play in your work?

The idea of sound art was first introduced to me by Stephen Vitiello, who came by my gallery, Studio Five Beekman about 1997. I was familiar with Klangkunst and some of Max Neuhaus’s work, but I had considered what I was doing at the gallery to be composition, coming out of the tradition of Cage and Young. For me, the idea of sound art took form when I began to consider the relationships between architecture, social space, sound, musical form, and the act of listening. How does the way you sit, and your body’s relationship to other people, impact your state of mind while listening? How does the relationship between architecture, social spaces, and the interactions with musicians influence musical form?

For me, sound art and installations really become about the social space. What kind of interactions are there going to be once the piece is set up? I’m focused on creating installations where it all works together; a space where people come to listen and they’re not fighting what I’ve set up socially with the music. I want to create spaces where people come in and their ears open up.

Tell me about the origin of “Living Room Pieces” – When did it begin? What inspired it?

The whole project began in the early 2000s, but this specific manifestation is from March 2021. I was thinking about all the different spaces that we use to listen and consume music. I also wanted to create a work that responded to the way that people listen to music at home. I don’t want to over-generalize it, everyone has their own way of listening to music, but a lot of people spend more time listening to moments of sound or individual songs rather than whole albums. I think back to when my father would listen to music on his home stereo and he had this whole ritual. He’d go to the record store, come back with an LP, and sit in a chair in front of the stereo for the entire record.

Sound is a presence. It’s an intrusive, all-encompassing presence that can go through walls, through vents, and I knew that if I made a sound installation for the home, it needed to take this into account. The piece needed to be as varied as possible and, at the same time, complement the things happening in a home.

The installation is composed of around 7,000 individual sound files and plays through a seven-day cycle made up of unique modules from these sound files. Each day has its own character and flow, and this will repeat each week — the same day will have a similar density of material and other characteristics, but a different set of sounds.

You mentioned that the current manifestation is set to play 8, 10 or 12 hours per day, every day. What’s the longest someone has kept it running?

An artist named Antoine Laval used to live at the Chelsea Hotel and kept it on 24 hr/day for a year. We’d have parties and invite people over to listen. It’s the longest anyone has had it on, and it was on 24 hours/day. Right now, there’s a couple in Boston and a guy in Brussels who have each had it for about 7 months, since September 2021.

A few weeks after Antoine set it up in his apartment, we met and it was clear he hadn’t slept - his eyes were bloodshot. He told me, “Michael, I like your piece, but I can’t sleep.” I was confused because I had made it so that it got really quiet at night. But he told me that it was the quiet sounds that were keeping him up, thinking it was a mouse or something! He wanted loud sounds at night, sounds that were more like the garbage trucks that would come by every night at 3 or 4AM. We added a bunch of louder sounds at night and it totally fixed the problem.

The installation comes with instructions and is simple to use. Is there any additional advice you give people before they set it up in their home?

The installation comes with two speakers and I advise people to space them out. They’re not meant to be used side-by-side like a stereo. Also, don’t be afraid to move them around and adjust things. Play with the placement of the installation so that it feels right for you and your space. Play with the volume; turn it off (the speakers, not the computer!), give it a rest. Own the experience. This isn’t a holy object, nothing precious.

Michael’s Upcoming Events

Sally Silvers @ Roulette, December 2022, https://roulette.org/

w/ Eiko Ishibashi @ Artists Space, NYC, June 8, 2022, https://artistsspace.org/

urMix, an interactive listening device, with pieces by Bryan Chase, Dan Joseph, Bradford Reed and others https://www.harvestworks.org/2021-sponsored-projects/

Michael’s recs for related artists/spaces

Olivia Block
Jim O’Rourke
CT:SWAM: https://ctswam.org/
Liz Gerring Dance Company in NYC: https://www.lizgerringdance.org/
Q-02 in Brussels: http://www.q-o2.be/en/
Black Hole, LA-based space for audio run by Micah Silver
Floating Sound Gallery, cool multichannel space: http://soundartgallery.ru/?lang=en

About Michael

Photo of Michael J. Schumacher in performance taken by Michael Yu
Image Description: A man is seen sitting at a table in front of a laptop and white synthesizer. One hand is poised mid-air while the other manipulates the instrument.

Michael J. Schumacher has worked with spatialized sound, computers, and electronics since the 1980s, creating multi-channel, generative "Room Pieces" presented in galleries, museums, concert halls, and public and private spaces. XI Records has published a DVD set of five sound installations as computer applications, playable on up to eight speakers, which may be installed on a computer to create sound environments in the home. “The Portable Multi-channel Sound System” is an 8 or 12 channel system that fits in a suitcase, with which he has toured Europe and the United States.

Schumacher studied music composition with Stanley Applebaum, Bernhard Heiden, John Eaton, and Vincent Persichetti and piano with Seymour Bernstein, John Ogdon, and Shigeo Neriki. He has degrees from Indiana University and Juilliard. He's also worked with La Monte Young, Giampaolo Bracali, and Milton Babbitt and collaborated with choreographers, poets, architects, musicians, and filmmakers including Oren Ambarchi, Bruce Andrews, Tom Chiu, Charles Curtis, Liz Gerring, Ken Jacobs, Victoria Meyers, Ursula Scherrer, and Stephen Vitiello.

Schumacher has received awards and residencies from NYSCA, NYFA, Harvestworks, RPI, DAAD and others. He's an adjunct professor at NYU and Ramapo College and has guest-lectured at Bard and RPI as well as having recently been the Varèse professor at Berlin's Technical University.

Throughout the spring, ¼” and XLR level ESS members have the incredible opportunity to experience “Living Room Pieces”: A sound installation designed to live with you in your home.

“Sound is a presence. It’s an intrusive, all-encompassing presence that can go through walls, through vents, and I knew that if I made a sound installation for the home, it needed to take this into account.”