In 2010, five years after Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath devastated the city of New Orleans, a collapsing Creole cottage on Piety Street in the Bywater, owned by New Orleans Airlift co-founder Jay Pennington (aka Rusty Lazer), became the catalyst for a grand experiment in "musical architecture." Pennington imagined the space could be transformed into a headquarters for Airlift as well as a performance venue. He placed the project into the hands of artist and Airlift co-founder Delaney Martin, sound artist Taylor Lee Shepherd, and visiting installation artist Swoon. Collectively everyone was inspired by the materiality and history of the Creole cottage, the everyday presence of music in New Orleans, and the city’s under-celebrated class of tinkerers, inventors and avant-garde musicians. Together they envisioned that structure they were building would not simply be a stage for musicians to play their instruments upon, but that the structure itself would be the instrument. Plans emerged for an entirely new structure that artists could climb on and interact with - an aesthetically unlikely “house” that would have instruments and sound built in to it.

Many months later a collective vision emerged and the civic nature of the project was born through the work of 25 artists. The Music Box: A Shantytown Sound Laboratory opened in 2011 as a prototyping experiment in "musical architecture." Over the course of nine months, 15,000 visitors came to interact with invented instruments that were embedded in the ceilings, walls and floors of multiple structures, and 70+ musicians from New Orleans and beyond performed orchestral concerts on the installation to sold-out audiences.

Since that time, the project has grown mightily through the hard work and idiosyncratic vision of hundreds more collaborators, in a series of national and international locations. After closing the original Music Box, opportunities to create outposts of this New Orleans-inspired project took Airlift as far as Kiev, Ukraine and as close to home as Shreveport, Louisiana. In 2015, The Music Box Roving Village appeared in the wilds of New Orleans' City Park. The public once again fell in love with the project, with over 10,000 people visiting over the course of six weekends. In addition to public hours, thousands of children attended field trips, and the performances brought another slew of incredible musicians - Free Jazz master William Parker, Solange Knowles, Wilco, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Arto Lindsay to name a few.