playing the building

David Byrne is once again making music with architecture. This former Talking Heads frontman is staging “Playing the Building,” an installation in which a structure becomes an instrument, at the Roundhouse Theater in London.

The piece allows visitors to make the walls and ceiling vibrate and oscillate through a series of cables attached to a pump organ. The music — cacophonous and clangy — isn’t Bach, Mr. Byrne told The A.P., but that’s intentional. “It kind of levels the playing field as far as performance goes,” he said. “We are all equally amateur at it.”

The Roundhouse, where the Talking Heads played with the Ramones and the Stranglers in 1976 to a crowd that expressed its appreciation by spitting, was built in 1846 as a railway station and has been a concert hall off and on since the 1960s.
Marcus Davey, the theater’s artistic director, said, “This is the first time the Roundhouse has a chance to play for itself.”
The installation runs from Saturday until Aug. 31.