Myriad

“Myriad“, which consists of ‘countless’ music boxes mechanisms arranged in lines, is a collaborative work by Berlin based Topotek 1 and , Rebecca Saunders, a British composer.

Mass-produced identical 2,002 music boxes spread over the surface of a wall which is about 2.4 meters in height and 15.6 meters in width. It’s overwhelming scale and impersonal uniformity infer urban architectures associating with the sense of unfeeling. Yet, even so, try to come up to the work and turn spring of an orgel. The familiarity of the 54 distinctively recognizable tunes in turn evokes a strong sense of childhood intimacy and kindred personal histories.

The voids between columns, tables and chairs, and bookshelves are filled up with the sound untamed and fluid. If two or more music boxes are simultaneously activated, the melodies generate a polyphonic composition, projecting cumulative surfaces of sound into the acoustic space. The mixture of sounds created by you and other visitors will be very unusual and startling.