Part home, part musical instrument — NOLA’s Music Box

From NPR.org, In The Music Box, New Orleans Residents Hear Hope:

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it left behind a city full of destroyed homes. Despite ongoing rebuilding efforts, thousands of blighted properties remain. Now, a group of artists is creating a structure that is part home, part musical instrument and part inspiration of what can be made of these damaged properties.

The Music Box is a small village of ramshackle sculptures huddled together on Piety Street in the Bywater section of the once-flooded 9th Ward. The sculptures are outfitted as musical instruments and are made almost entirely of the remains of the 18th-century Creole cottage that used to sit on this lot.

The Heartbeat House is one of these musical sculptures: It’s an A-frame shack with a rotating organ speaker perched on top. The speaker is attached to a stethoscope — which broadcasts the heartbeats of those who stop to engage with the art.

“Unlike a church bell [that] calls people to congregation or an alarm, what we want to have is a Experience the Sounds of the Musical Instruments that make up the Music Box heartbeat,” explains curator Delaney Martin. “This primal beat that calls to the people of New Orleans and says: Come out and dance, come out and sing, come out and have fun.”

The instruments housed in the Music Box are described here. One, the Voxmuron, “is comprised of a microphone that feeds a series of audio loop devices that can be recorded on to and played by mahogany paddles. Complicated metal linkages that power the paddles and a complex organization of wires are masked behind a decorative, finished wall-panel. This wall of sound is intended to evoke the sound of neighbors talking or playing music on the other side of a thin wall. The sound of this instrument is never the same. It is dependent on who or what is recorded into it. A very versatile producer of sound.”

You can listen to one performance on Voxmuron by Matana Roberts and Taylor Shepard right here:

You can’t own facts — Tremé belongs to all of us.

Tremé is a neighborhood in New Orleans. Treme is an HBO series about New Orleans residents rebuilding their lives after Hurricane Katrina. The Chicory opines correctly that the t-shirt pictured to the left does not infringe any rights anyone holds in the television series. There cannot be a copyright in a fact, so there can be no copyright in the name “Treme.” And while trademark is a distinctive sign or symbol (a “mark”), the t-shirt bears no font or insignia distinctive to the television show. So get your Treme t-shirts and show your support for my friends in New Orleans.

Hat tip to Ray Ward.