Bluebrain's 'The Living House'

'The Living House' transforms an empty, multi-room home on H Street into a singular sound piece -- each room becomes a stem of a larger, multitrack recording that includes melody, ambiance and sound design. Speakers are placed in 7 rooms (4 downstairs, 2 upstairs) with accompanying colored lights that flash in synchronization with their respective audio. Sound, quite literally, runs through the house. For instance, a singular synth note might start at the back of the house, gradually spilling over and spreading into the next room until it finds its way to the stairs and snakes up the house. Or perhaps the sound of actual footsteps travel from room to room, like ghosts. The sound of the floor creaking under pressure in a room upstairs is followed by the sound of that floor giving into the weight of an imagined bathtub as the speaker in the room directly below takes over and amplifies the sound of a collapsing floor. Sounds may be isolated to a single room at times, at other times each room might harmonize with one another, the entire house singing as one.

'The Living House' will run for 2 days over a weekend, with 30 people admitted entrance at a time through reservations.

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Bluebrain is the Washington DC-based music duo of brothers Hays and Ryan Holladay. In their two years of existence, they've gained a local reputation for executing imaginative projects throughout the city and in collaboration with area institutions. Projects range from staging a 150-plus people 'boombox walk' to their most recent endeavor, a "location-aware album" designed for The National Mall. They've been featured in WIRED, Engadget, TIME, Fast Company and, for their National Mall project, a Style-section cover story in the Washington Post. More information available upon request--

Financiado pelo capítulo Washington, DC (December 2011)