Heys, T.E.B., 2016.

Furniture Music

Furniture Music was a research project and solo sound installation by Toby Heys at the LEVEL Centre. It comprised new compositions exploring sound as a sense and our reactions to sound at the very edge of perception. Furniture Music was a term coined by Erik Satie in 1917 and refers to the idea of background music or sound for informal spaces. Toby's unique sound installation plays with this idea by using frequencies that reside at the edge of human perception - played through an array of unique speakers built into specially made furniture. The sound can be controlled from a leather-clad bench in the middle of the gallery space. Furniture Music explores how these sounds renegotiate our somatic interfaces - the skin, bone and muscle tissue that we image constitutes the boundary markers between ourselves and the world that surrounds us.