Hub and Spoke.

Audio Collective. This is the sound of a burning piano.

It sounds just like any other wooden thing that burns.

The rush of air and the collapse of beams and the crackle.

Except every now and then you hear a string snap, a tiny little musical streak.

And you remember what is being consumed.

It makes this piano feel alive.

A lot of pianists have told me that they do feel like their pianos are alive, that they have distinctive personalities.

Not all musicians, though, think to set them on fire.

But the artist and composer Ana La Lockwood is not just any musician.

She is an artist of sound.

She is a composer of art.

Her music is performance art, and her art is always, always audio-rich and musical.

She sends her microphones into the elements, fire here, and rivers in a recent series called

Sound Maps, where she captures, among other things, the tonality of the different depths of the

water.

She loves chanting, tones, drones.

She loves what sound does to our bodies, how we respond to it, how we visualize it, how sound breathes, how we breathe differently around different sounds.

Yeah. around different sounds. And for me, as an art historian who fell in love with sound, I get it.

I think I get it.

The world of sound and the world of the visual are often pitted against each other,

or at least

...