Living Room Pieces

Michael J. Schumacher (2024)

LIVING ROOM PIECES

“Here's something genuinely new for you.” We receive many submissions that make such a claim, but rarely have they lived up to their promise so fully as Michael J. Schumacher’s Living Room Pieces. A sound installation designed for living spaces, the work consists of a Raspberry Pi (small computer) in a metal case connected to two speakers, ideally as far apart as possible, that plays and modulates a variety of sounds for 12 hours each day (with large blocks of silence between) on a 7-day cycle. As the order of the sounds is always changing, and the computer alters various parameters of the sounds in real time—including volume, delay between channels, and playback speed—each cycle is unique and never to be repeated.

Released in an edition of 10 on Brian Chase’s Chaikin Records, curious listeners can find one unit is being live streamed in real time until the end of the year. I was fortunate to spend two weeks living with Living Room Pieces. ACL usually reviews records, and while we’ve covered some unusual formats (embedded in soap, a log, concrete, attached to a light bulb), we’ve never covered anything quite like this.

Schumacher is a composer and Living Room Pieces no doubt a kind of musical work, but it is also something very different, namely in the way living with the work, including its long stretches of silence, foregrounds a kind of experience that is removed from the usual contemplation associated with music criticism. Nor is this ambient music, if we consider Brian Eno’s famous definition: “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” There are moments of Living Room Pieces that are most certainly not ignorable. Living with a sound work is a phenomenological experience, altering our attunement to our quotidian soundscape by calling into question whether we are hearing “the symphony outside our windows,” to evoke John Cage, or the work itself.

It is impossible, then, to compare the work to a record or a traditional piece of music. Any album-length stereo version would be a distinct work. And in fact this is only the latest in a long series of Schumacher’s “Room Pieces,” part of his practice of spatialized sound and algorithmic composition that began in the 1980s. Living Room Pieces is distinct from earlier iterations in so far as it is designed for living spaces, and thus the listener’s experience of the work is much more intimate, presenting opportunities for living with the work in a profoundly affective way. Schumacher prepared 301 sound modules, which the computer sequences and alters in real time. These sounds are divided into 11 categories: Spoken, Ambiences, Pieces/Solos, and four Noise/Pitch pairs [Rhythmic, Static, Intermittent, Active Sustained]. Some readers may be reminded of Italian Futurist pioneer Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto, The Art of Noises, which divides sounds into "six families of noise" (Roars, Hissing, Murmurs, Creaking, etc). Each of Schumacher’s modules is between three and seven minutes in length, with long intervals of silence between. Those silences, coupled with the wide variety of sounds and their algorithmic modulation, results in a piece that continually surprises.

Living with Living Room Pieces

Perhaps what surprised me most about living with Michael J. Schumacher’s Living Room Pieces for two weeks was the way in which I became unsure what I was hearing at any given time. Was that sound coming from the speakers or from outside the window? This state of disorientation, and the mode of listening it then engendered, was also what I found most compelling about the work. But first I should say more about the content of the sound modules, as their variety affected this reattunement.

Many of the sounds initially seemed to be non-tonal, often close-mic’d clacking and cluttering, with occasional moments of digital tonality or pitched rhythms. These include static noise but also pitched static, occasionally sliding from one pitch to another, or following a melodic pattern. I was surprised, therefore, when voices first emerged towards the middle of the first cycle. When first heard, I assumed something was going on downstairs. Unable to discern any semantic content, the effect is rather like crowd noise, quite a strange sensation in one’s living room. The rare moments of more traditional music (Solos/Pieces) contrast to the ambiences that make up much of the other modules, and while this could seem like a lack of cohesion on the contrary it is necessary to create that feeling of disorientation that seems to be at the core of Living Room Pieces.

Of course there are difficulties living with an installation that makes sound for 12 hours each day. Media Arts, and Sound in particular, have a complicated history with the the art world. Sound was deemed unfit for the gallery, and while some of this was traditionalist rigidity and gatekeeping, there are practical concerns. I love the ending of Dr. Strangelove as much as the next guy, but should a poor gallery attendant be subjected to “We’ll Meet Again” on loop for hours? (Now that’s Vexations!) I teach from home, and so during my classes I would lower the volume, mostly without problem, but once I did have to turn off the speaker entirely. There were also technical challenges. When my apartment lost power five days in, the weekly cycle restarted, with the daily 12 hour cycle now beginning at 2 pm and running into the night.

Other sounds—the domestic soundscape, music, films—interact with the piece in interesting ways. As one might expect, I listen to a lot of music while at home, and the sheer serendipity of some juxtapositions will be known to anyone who creates spontaneously. Still, the uncanniness of some of these overlapping sounds never ceased to surprise. While listening to Sam Shalabi playing Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” on oud, for instance, Living Room Pieces’ gurgles and bustles and static filter sweeps crossed the room in a remarkable dance. The intensity of ELUCID’s REVELATOR, by contrast, left little room for augmentation, while Schumacher’s small clacks and fidgets made for an interesting counterpoint to the pulse of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

On some occasions, a module would begin playing and take me by surprise, particularly when in a different room. No matter how long the installation was in the apartment, some sound would still manage to disorient me. But this ran both ways. On one occasion I thought I was listening to Living Room Pieces, when in fact a neighbor’s car just had a very interesting sounding engine. Living with Living Room Pieces reattuned me to my domestic soundscape, such that I began to listen differently to the birds, bugs, wind chimes, motors, and the other sounds penetrating my apartment.

While I was setting up Living Room Pieces, billy woods sent out a tribute to the rapper Ka, who died on 12 October.

In the fall of 1989 my family returned to the U.S. and, for a time, stayed with family friends while my mother tried to rebuild the life we left behind ten years prior. We were, as Ka so succinctly put it, “living in the living room.”

This was a well-timed reminder that while living rooms are for living in, Living Room Pieces seems to presuppose a particularly bourgeois conception of domestic space, one which allows for silence, one which doesn’t plan on the power being cut during the duration of the cycle. That said, Schumacher’s piece is not aiming to be soothing background music, neither Erik Satie’s furniture music nor the “flow state” of Lo Fi Beats to Study To playlists. Again, the sounds of Living Room Pieces don’t so much as invite contemplation and change how we relate to our domestic space, whatever that may be. Since the piece is generative and never the same, the silences are just as crucial in changing our perception.

Anything can be music if we listen with compositional attention, even silence, as John Cage taught us. Living with Living Room Pieces reattunes our practice of listening in a similar manner. Sounds at the threshold of our consciousness become greeted with newfound openness. However, one critique of Cage may be apt. The way mindfulness or “radical acceptance” gets deployed in contemporary culture can often approach a kind of White bourgeois quietism, when direct statements, or better, direct action, might be called for instead. Worse, such acceptance can become a form of silencing, if, for instance, one never listens to any other media while the installation is active, no music or films or tv to compete with the work. Taken to its extreme—forbidding any competing sounds, controlling the personal soundscape—it becomes almost fascistic. But that’s not the affect of Living Room Pieces, which is rather more intimate and flexible. Each individual experience of Living Room Pieces is partly determined by the relationship between you and your living room.

Living Room Pieces is about atonement attunement. We routinely use media to reattune to space: music to change or reinforce our mood, the radio that keeps us company, the comfort of voices on TV to lull us to sleep, noise cancelling headphones to aid our focus, white noise machines to mask unwanted intrusions, and so on. Mack Hagood describes this as Orphic Media, arguing that “we do all these things in service of maintaining our vitality.” Elsewhere he goes further, in fact this is what media are for, in general: “tools for altering how the body feels and what it perceives, controlling our relationship to others and the world, enveloping ourselves, and even disappearing ourselves.” Vitality is another word for living, after all, and Living Room Pieces asks us to reattune to our lived environment. Such attunement is not a side-effect but, the root. Our living space is where we dwell, our wider domus, both in the sense of a physical space but also a place of belonging, with all that entails, something the experience of the pandemic demonstrated to many of us. Living Room Pieces thus feels timely. Not to make too much of an autocorrection, but, there is an etymological link between attunement and atonement: tune and tone, both stress relational coming into mutual being.

In this way, atonement becomes a process of retuning—aligning ourselves with the subtle frequencies of life, as Cage might suggest, where even silence becomes a medium for attunement. To live fully is to be in constant relationship with the world around us, to listen, adjust, and recalibrate our connections to the spaces we inhabit, the media that shape our perception, and the others with whom we share our lives. Living Room Pieces, in its exploration of this attunement, invites us to recognize that vitality—our ability to live, to feel, to be—is bound up with our capacity for atonement, a continual process of reconnection, realignment, and renewal. In this sense, the act of living itself is an act of attunement, of finding harmony and balance amid the noise, finding meaning in the space we occupy, and restoring the vitality that allows us to truly dwell. (Joseph Sannicandro)

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From November 15 through December 31, 2024, interested listeners will be able to hear a live stream, directly generated by a Living Room Pieces unit in real time, at this link. The stream will 23 hours a day, midnight to 11 am Eastern Time.

Michael J. Schumacher (photo: Michael Yu)