Michael J Schumacher Artist Statement
This project developed out of a series of sound installations called Room Pieces. I became interested in using chance operations to generate form and also began exploring multichannel sound systems, treating each speaker as a separate instrument. I composed dozens of these installations, each with a specific emotional character, making a conscious effort to push the envelope in terms of how much variety I could achieve using the same basic (algorithmic) approach.
As these experiments continued and the range of sounds increased, it occurred to me to create a “meta” work that combined all the sounds, to be listened over long time periodsmonths or years - in one’s living space. The basic structural idea of Room Pieces was to juxtapose sounds in different ways so that their changing contexts would reveal new qualities. In Living Room Pieces this process uses a much larger set of sounds and stretches over much longer periods.
I wanted to address the act of listening in the space where it most often happens: at home. In the field of experimental music, the format must fit the nature of the work; for process -based pieces, recordings often fall short. Running the sound art gallery Diapason, I learned how much the listening environment shapes the way a work's structure is perceived and whether it meets the listener's expectations.
In a sense, "Living Room Pieces" contains all of my previous "Room Piece" installations in the form of 301 modules that, in various combinations, comprised them. Additionally, a number of fixed media pieces are included in the category "solos” (7000+ audio samples in total.)
The category of "pieces" (one of the categories of sounds) includes any composition I create and record, including instrumental works. It resembles Duchamp’s idea of creating miniature versions of his pieces, all gathered in a single box.