The Experience of Living with Michael J. Schumacher’s ‘Living Room Pieces’

My first apartment in New York made me aware, with blaring clarity, how much living here makes you a hostage to sounds. Each night at 3:00 a.m., an illegal garbage pickup took place outside my street-facing window: thundering metallic clatters, reversing beeps, the frustrated horn-honking of drivers caught on the one-way street as this nightly noise concert kept them from wherever they were trying to get to at that late hour. I never slept through it. Sound engulfs us, invades us, forces us to orient ourselves around it. Only the homes of the wealthiest get any protection from sound’s most frustrating incursions, and even they can’t block it all out.

It was only a few years and a few apartments later that I could volunteer with such alacrity to live for a week with composer and sound artist Michael J. Schumacher’s Living Room Pieces, a sound installation for the home that algorithmically generates sounds made using combinations of more than 7,000 samples collected by Schumacher over decades. He has been experimenting with the idea—at-home sound art—for a while now; the first Living Room Pieces was a twelve-channel work that ran for a full year in Antoine Laval’s Chelsea Hotel apartment in 2005. The algorithm dates back even further, with Schumacher starting work on it in the nineties. Subsequent versions ran at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at the Singuhr Hoergalerie in Berlin, where visitors could book time in a residential apartment to experience the piece.

In 2021, a two-channel version of Living Room Pieces—now running with a Raspberry Pi processor—was released on a rental basis. In 2024, one can purchase the piece from Chaikin Records for $300 (the initial production sold out, but more are coming). Compact and simple, the user need only plug it in. While the piece runs on a seven-day cycle, the algorithmic nature and the massive body of samples mean that, theoretically, the artwork could play infinitely.

Schumacher’s influences are clear: musique concrète, indeterminacy, Marcel Duchamp… John Cage’s work on silence (Schumacher told me, “Silence is the basis of the whole thing”), and Living Room Pieces doesn’t so much push these ideas further as it moves them laterally from the art gallery or concert hall into the home. There’s a whiff of gimmickry to be found here for the cynical, but Schumacher’s concept packs enough of a punch on its own terms.

With the work, he strikes a balance between artfulness and chaos, with each day following a set of clearly defined rules and patterns that cohere around a series of prime numbers, indivisible and infinitely expandable. There is a lot of quiet: hours when the speakers are hushed, and I half-forgot they were there. But in the context of Living Room Pieces all of the daily sounds of apartment living felt heightened; my neighbors’ creaks and muffled television, the whir of the electric heating and the clattering of recycling in the back of the apartment were made momentarily unfamiliar and even slightly romantic. I lived with Living Room Pieces for seven days, with a few ground rules for myself. I wouldn’t turn the work off at any point, but I also wouldn’t orient myself around it by attempting to be home or planning to be out more than usual. The piece runs for twelve hours a day, and which twelve depends on when you first start the piece; I turned it on at 11:37 a.m., and it ran through to nearly midnight.

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To some extent, Living Room Pieces reminded me that living in proximity to others means you are always living in some level of sound installation—a composition created by you and everyone around you. The rhythms eventually become familiar, only noticeable when they break into your space in jarring ways. What Living Room Pieces offers is a way to view these sounds as interlocutors and cohabitants, to take delight in their ability to surprise and amuse us.

In my brief conversation with Schumacher, the composer told me he was most interested in how coincidental occurrence offers itself up to meaning-making. My week bears that out; it took only a few seconds of listening to start personifying the sounds. The power of the algorithm is in how we relate to it—how we make it feel both human and prophetic and fold it into our own lives. It’s easy, in the concert hall or a gallery space to cede the context of sounds to the artist; in your home, personal association is inevitable because the context is your own. This is its own source of delight, this human capacity for making external things internal. What follows here are my notes about the experience of this unique artwork, condensed and edited for clarity.

Day one: The setup

I am tired and slightly hungover when I pull Living Room Pieces out of its compact box, unfurling wires, two speakers and a minuscule Raspberry Pi computer. As per the instructions, I position the speakers as far apart as I can; one speaker rests on a chair in the corner; the other is positioned next to my television on the other side of the room. My living room is strewn with papers. Art leans against the wall, and there are three mostly empty wine bottles behind the passive speaker. I switch the speaker on, and it gurgles pleasantly. After a silence, the artwork comes to life with an inquisitive xylophone. I’m joined by another listener, a tiny brownish mouse. I yelp, and the mouse retreats. But it peeps its head back out as the distorted xylophone hoots around us, as if soundtracking this little interspecies exchange. It scampers into a hall closet. I tell it sternly to stay there unless it wants to be part of my article. Minutes later, it emerges again—the little fame hound. I clap at it. Living Room Pieces is silent now, but my claps echo. Throughout the day, the speakers chitter intermittently; it clicks and judders while I call my mother. A voice emerges, intoning some lines from e.e. cummings: “bang is the meaning of gun.” Later, around 10:00 p.m. after a lengthy silence, I jump as a voice passes between the speakers, saying “the hills are alive with the sound of stress,” offset by a few milliseconds. I start laughing, alone in my house.

Day two: Elvis

My upstairs neighbors are doing their Saturday morning ritual, which involves loud television, the heavy footfalls of toddlers and what sounds like dragging around every piece of furniture. All through brunch with a friend, we wait for Living Room Pieces to come to life. When it does, we pause to listen: Keith Richards’ voice fills the room talking about Elvis, who “probably heard more Black music than he did white.” Richards’ voice begins to skip, breaking apart across the two channels. My friend compares the experience to that of having schizophrenia; voices appear and they must be heard or consciously ignored. To ignore is active, requiring effort. This interview plays, distorted and chopped up, all day. Later, I think that getting Living Room Pieces was like placing my apartment on an Airbnb for ghosts; a voluntary invitation to be haunted by sounds.

Day three: Capture

Living Room Pieces chatters to life almost exactly at the beginning of its time; the sound is like a stick being dragged along a fence. I hear something else, a scrabbling, but it’s not from the speakers. It’s coming from a corner, where the mouse is in the trap. I joke later to a friend, after I release the mouse into a pile of leaves in the park, that he clearly didn’t want to live in a sound art installation. Maybe this mouse is a tiny philistine, or maybe he’s heard this type of thing before. Later, Living Room Pieces creaks and squeaks over the sound of a kettle coming to boil, and it feels like company. Much later, I’m reading John Berger’s tiny, lovely “A Mouse Story,” Living Room Pieces passes zips of sound, string plucks sped-up, clipped out and filters, between the two speakers, with me caught between them.

Day four: Interruptions

At 1:00 p.m., LRP shakes to life with a sound like metal cicadas over a slight but rapid heartbeat. There are electronic chitters, string samples. The ghost is more energetic today—everything has a brisk rhythmic quality, and the sounds are more densely packed. I have to turn the system volume down twice. There is a low crowd sound, too muffled to make out words. Someone laughs from the speakers, but I’m feeling sort of graciously exasperated.

Day five: Antagonists

I am late on all of my deadlines and working frantically while trying and failing not to watch the political coverage. Living Room Pieces zips and murmurs with tangy, metallic noises. For the first time, this artwork feels like an enemy, an intruder in my space. I tell it to shut up and retreat into my bedroom, where I can still hear it anyway, and where, cowering below my radiator, is another mouse. I go out for the rest of the day.

Day six: Outside

I awaken at four in the morning to the sound of car alarms surging in a chorus; I think Living Room Pieces is malfunctioning but then realize they’re real cars. I wonder, absurdly, if somehow Living Room Pieces is calling other sounds to me, and fall back asleep. The first I hear of Living Room Pieces after I wake up properly is bird song and a cymbal, then the sound of objects clattering to the floor. The boundaries of my apartment feel transparent, as if all the sounds outside it come right through. Then a startling sound of something revving, a metal buzz that startles, and the reverbed pluck of a low string. An hour or so later, there’s a metallic scraping, like someone scouring metal pots or moving file cabinets. Later, it punctuates a conversation with a friend with little zips so perfectly timed that it feels like it’s responding directly to us, though I know it isn’t.

Day seven: Party

I throw a party for Living Room Pieces, which, after an exceptionally noisy sixth day, thrums with ambient chords. While the combinations of pitches are randomized, most of the chords have some kind of major triad. I am slightly crestfallen about the chill vibes; after days of acting up, it’s suddenly on its most demure behavior. Anticipating its departure, I feel warmly towards it. People pile into my apartment, and we talk so loudly that sometimes it takes a few seconds of sound before we all stop to listen. The singers in the room, including myself, can’t help but hum or “ooh” along with the chords, but the chatter quickly rebounds around the sound. We drink a toast to the work, and when it finally falls silent for the evening, the house feels emptier. I put on music for the first time in a week.