A musical installation for your living room – that takes an entire week to hear

“The world is teeming,” wrote John Cage in one of his essays on silence. “Anything can happen.” He could have been talking about the room where I spend most of my time. If there’s one thing you’ll never hear in my apartment overlooking a busy block of D.C., it’s nothing.

Most days, my home soundtrack is a long-form improvisational composition of birdsong, truck brakes, faraway sirens, passing helicopters, this one guy who bikes by blasting disco from a giant speaker and — give or take — one bar fight per week. Cage, who prized the “aleatoric” or random, would have loved it. I get the feeling Michael Schumacher might, too.

This week, Schumacher — a gallerist focused on sound art and a composer specializing in spatialized sound and algorithmic composition — will release a limited edition of “Living Room Pieces,” a self-contained sound installation for home use, or, in its parlance, “designed for living spaces.” Once connected to speakers, plugged in and switched on, a tiny dedicated Raspberry Pi computer launches into a seven-day cycle of ever-changing, self-assembling musique concrète.

Drawing from a sound bank of more than 7,000 “musical shapes, textures and gestures,” as Schumacher broadly describes the mix of sampled audio, field recordings and musical fragments, “Living Room Pieces” sorts and sequences the sounds into 301 “modules” and algorithmically arranges their selection and playback through a cycle of seven “modes,” one anchored to each day.

Schumacher created his first “Living Room” work in 2005, setting up 12 speakers around the three rooms of artist Antoine Laval’s apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where the piece ran uninterrupted for a year, politely lowering its own volume at night. Future iterations tweaked the parameters — at Empac, the experimental media and performing arts center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Schumacher distributed the sound across an array of 30 speakers scattered around the premises.

In 2021, Schumacher migrated the piece to a fleet of compact Raspberry Pi computers with a consumer-friendly two-channel output (i.e., stereo). He sent installation kits to friends and colleagues, who kept them running in their homes for a month or so and sent them onward, a few of them even adding their own sounds to the pool, changing the work as it changed hands.

One of these units showed up at my building last week. And while I was hesitant to commit a full week at home to an additional layer of ambient noise, the allure of the idea was hard to resist.

The press release attending the new limited edition of 10 units (on sale Friday through Chaikin Records) analogized the sonic effect of “Living Room Pieces” to the visual impact of paintings. And in the little installation booklet that shows you how to set up the speakers (as far from each other as possible), Schumacher explains that the idea is to encourage “an increased awareness of one’s presence in space — architectural, communal and individual.”

Silence (or, to be technical, the absence of output) plays a big part in this project. It accounts for an estimated 33 to 77 percent of the device’s “sound” in a given day — an internal scheme based on prime numbers that allows sounds to emerge through a mix of intrusion and illusion.

Sometimes sounds would chime in at regular-seeming intervals, as if triggered by a thermostat or a timer. Sometimes they would break a stretch of quiet with an unexpected outburst, like a nervous guest. And other times, they insinuated themselves into my environment — a faint speaking voice audible as if through a nonexistent wall, or a slight buzz camouflaged by the fan of my laptop.

For the first hour or so after I plugged it in, I wasn’t sure anything was happening at all. Within an hour, the crackle of an AM radio signal started darting from one speaker to the other — a frequency searching in a panic for a signal. This thickened into a dense digital blanket of white noise, which eventually entered into an oscillating tango with my air purifier. An hour later, I was intermittently alarmed by what sounded like someone hosing out a plastic barrel.

Living together, it seemed, would require the same grace, patience and selective attention I reserve for clanging radiator pipes or the ongoing racket on the street outside my windows.

But as the days went on, I started to anticipate these new sounds, and caught myself sitting in silence, consciously waiting for them to show up so I could do the equivalent of cloud-gazing: Was that rain filling a clay pot? Or was it someone frying bacon (and adding reverb)? I was so distracted by a string of Martian warbles and bleeps approximating the cadence of speech that I almost missed a Zoom.

At first I tried discerning which “mode” we were engaged with each morning: a “Serial” mode assembles a row of 12 modules and repeats them; another restricts itself to just one type of sound and stays there all day; another layers sounds into ambient chords like a synthetic wind chime. But by Day 3, when recordings of E.E. Cummings and Robinson Jeffers reading their poems began filtering in through whipping washes of static — as if from deep space — I’d loosened my grip on caring.

When I came home from the office on Day 3, I was slightly offended to walk in on the device making sounds without me, living a life of its own. Early in the evening, what I mistook for the steady drip of a water leak in the wall coaxed me into the closet — then the sound multiplied and scattered around the room like a clump of bothered spiders.

Many of Schumacher’s sounds play with their formlessness: A resonant crackle that consumed the first half of Day 4 sounded like a fire made of water — and was oddly relaxing in the background. I was lulled to sleep by the dry thunk of what might have been a distant skipping record.

On Day 5 — which I believe was the “chord” day — sounds fell like shadows across my apartment: a wispy mist of sine waves, a fuzzy memory of church bells. For reasons known only to the algorithm, these were sporadically interrupted by unadorned recordings of plaintiff’s arguments from the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges. Two crunchy guitar notes fought over the armrest for most of the morning on Day 6 — a listening experience comparable to eavesdropping.

Day 7 was mostly little hisses and pulses, as if the transmission was fading for good. And as the house darkened a little earlier than usual, I found myself a little sad that our time together was coming to a close — that it would no longer be altering the atmosphere of my apartment like an air conditioner. (I’ll also miss the installation’s way of making me feel like I’m in a strange movie about myself.)

But most of all, and most to my surprise, I enjoyed this mode of listening, which seemed to upturn everything I expect from music: It was intentional but not deliberate, organized but decentralized, individual but communal, composed but set free. Turning my living room into a temporary habitat for Schumacher’s stray sounds changed my relationship to the space entirely. Lately I’ve been leaving the windows open just to listen. Cage would be proud.

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Michael Brodeur is a classical music critic at The Washington Post. Brodeur served as lead music critic and music editor at the Boston Phoenix before serving as an arts editor and cultural critic at the Boston Globe.