Music Box Village

Tours & Outposts

As we continue to grow the Music Box Village, we also continue to find ways to explore and to share the concepts of "musical architecture" with the wider world. With Porch Life, our mobile work of "musical architecture," we are now able to visit audiences and artists across the US!

We also remain committed to building Music Box Outposts in new locales.
These collaborative projects reflect the unique culture of other cities, and often live permanently in those places.

porch life

Porch Life is an ambitiously-sized mobile musical house built onto a 16-foot trailer, designed to bring the magic of the Music Box Village to neighborhoods and cities around the country.

Porch Life is about gathering places between the indoors and outdoors, twilight hours spent together between daytime and nighttime, and the evolutionary life of a house from genesis to ruin. Sitting on stoops, swinging on porch swings and other natural gestures will sonically bring this structure to life.

Instruments include the Quintronics Weather Panel, a large analog synthesizer controlled via a set of sensors to detect and literally play changes in the wind, sun, and temperature. Other sonic and visual contributions by artists Swoon, Delaney Martin, Taylor Lee Shepherd, Christian Repaal, Meschiya Lake, Marshall Hawks, Alita Edgar, and Leah Hennessy include a porch swing metronome, harp banisters, chime and reverb balustrades, a staircase drum machine, and bim-bap and marimba railings.

On its 2018 inaugural summer tour, Porch Life appeared at the Jazz & Heritage Festival (New Orleans), the Eaux Claires festival (Eau Claire, WI), Dabls African Bead Museum (Detroit, MI), Coney Island (NYC), and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington DC). We hosted public play and concerts by acclaimed musicians, often using the sculpture as an official stage at larger festival venues. Future tours are in the works for 2020 and beyond!

Porch Life at the Kennedy Center, Washington DC

music box outposts

Music Box Village Outposts are one of the most exciting ways we share our community with the world. Outposts celebrate the intrinsic value of everyday sounds and reclaimed materials, found in the unique places we visit.

Airlift sends New Orleans artists to work with builders, inventors and musicians in their own cities. The collaborative process involves researching the architectural and musical history of a specific place, and working closely with local artists. Some Outposts are permanent; others become part of our local installation, bringing distant stories, spaces and ideas back home.

Kiev, Ukraine
Airlift was invited by the American Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine in cooperation with the Art Arsenale Museum to realize an outpost installation of Musical Architecture. This was our first “Outpost” and has become the model for expanding our idea of Musical Architecture to new communities. By researching the architectural and musical history of the specific place and working with seven local artists, we were able to create an installation that reflected Kiev’s unique culture.
Kiev, Ukraine
Collaborating Artists: Delaney Martin, Taylor Lee Shepherd and Andrew Schrock collaborated with Ukrainian artists Ivanov Down, and Dmytro Nikolaienko to build the structure. Airlift also imported instruments like Ranjit Bhatnagar’s Noise Floor and Lindsay Karty’s Electric Curtain, plus new inventions from Music Box artists Taylor Kuffner, Ben Mortimer and Ross Harmon.
Shreveport, LA
New Orleans Airlift second outpost of musical architecture was part of the Shreveport Regional Arts Council’s UNSCENE! Residency program. Airlift was so happy to work with over 30 local artists from Shreveport, sharing ideas and building musical houses together. The most exciting element of our project is that our collaborators are now in charge of the installation, creating their own performances and experiences in this new musical village. Our site was in the shadow of the Calanthean Temple, a building erected in 1923 by the Order of Calanthe, an African-American womens society that held legendary performances by Cab Calloway and others during the heyday of Shreveport’s music scene in the 1940s.
Shreveport, LA
Collaborating Artists: Taylor Lee Shepherd, Delaney Martin, Ross Harmon, Frank Pahl, Homer Flynn, Peter Fetterman, Jon Mackey, James Marks, Jimmy Cousins, Nate Treme, Christian Maes, Brett Roberts, James October, The Slade Collective. Seen here: "The Bower's Nest" and "Shake House" currently live in the Music Box Village.
Atlanta, GA
"Resonant Memory" is the culmination of Airlift's partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology. The partnership began with a multi-disciplinary course in Musical Architecture that brought together the graduate students from Architecture, New Music Technology, Human and Computer Interaction, and Industrial Design in Spring 2014.
Atlanta, GA
Airlift brought local Atlanta artists George Long and Justin Rabideau into collaboration with a group of Georgia Tech students including architecture students Takuto Osawa, John Stenzel and Tyler Smith, Industrial design student Mauricio Uruena on our design team. Recent graduates Andy Pruett and Ziwen Fan were on the music technology team along with Atlanta geniuses Myron Lo and Hiron Roy. Together they realized some of the spring's muscial architecture prototypes into a fully-fledged musical house. Also joining the partnership was Goat Farm Arts Center, who hosted the build of the project and the debut of Resonant Memory at their annual art induced Halloween extravaganza. The house then moved to the Georgia Tech campus for student interactions and on campus concerts. Ben Coleman acted as musical director, working with our tech team to create samples, and as conductor of the intitial concerts at Goat Farm and Tech. Built to be transportable, Resonant Memory is currently part of the Music Box Village.
Tampa, Florida
The USF Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) presented The Music Box: Tampa Bay, a musical architecture project by visiting artists New Orleans Airlift, curated by Sarah Howard, Curator of Public Art and Social Practice, with assistance from Shannon Annis in Spring 2016. This interactive public artwork that fused architecture, engineering, history and music-making, The Music Box: Tampa Bay was a performance space and site for exploration, experimentation and discovery at the Community Stepping Stones (CSS) site at Mann-Wagnon Park along the primordial Hillsborough River in the Sulphur Springs neighborhood of Tampa full of alligators and manatees!
Tampa, Florida
The Music Box: Tampa Bay was comprised of three temporary structures with embedded instrumentation designed to produce sounds when interacted with and performed by musicians and visitors. During the month of March, Airlift artists and Music Box founders Delaney Martin and Taylor Shepherd led the project featuring collaborating local artists Jan Awai, Devon Brady and Michael Lemieux from Livework Studios, community-based land artist, Tory Tepp, and NYC-based artists Ranjit Bhatnagar and Alyssa Dennis to design and construct the musical village. Students from CSS and USF College of The Arts worked with the artists to execute the public art installation and presentation.
Tampa, Florida
Art works included "The Symphonium" (LiveWork), a bicycle powered instrument drawing water from the Hillsborough river to power a series of horns in a water tower, "Pitch Bo", (Dennis and Bhatnagar) a two story structure with playable floorboards and sliding doors, and "Lunar Tool Shed" (Tepp) that came with sonic shovels and wheelbarrows and which used water pumped from "The Symphonium" to power percussive instrumentation and water flowers that grew around the structure over the course of the installation. Tepp’s piece remains at the site while the other two structures have joined Airlift’s permanent Music Box Village in New Orleans.
North Adams, MA
New Orleans Airlift brings its Music Box project to North Adams, Massachusetts at the invitation of TOURISTS and MASS MoCA. Delaney Martin and Taylor Shepherd, two of the Music Box’s co-founders, and project alumni Klaas Hübner (Berlin) and Andrew Schrock (New Orleans) are building new musical architecture with help from locals artists and volunteers. The new works take inspiration from North Adam’s industrial mill history and its nickname of “Steeple Town” due to its many churches whose steeples dot the landscape. Collaborating Artists: Taylor Lee Shepherd, Delaney Martin, Klass Hubner, and Andrew Schrock.