January 2012. A musical village brings new sounds to New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood.

If you’ve never heard the sound of clouds you’ve never been to the “Shantytown Music Box” in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood. A group of artists led by curator Delany Martin has created a whimsical village of fully interactive musical buildings on a vacant lot on Piety Street.

Walking through the painted wooden gates into the courtyard is like walking into a foreign land—each miniature house has its own multitude of sounds, ranging from jangling bells and antique bottles to a high-tech “Sunset Drone.” The Drone was constructed by New Orleans artist Quintron and creates sounds using a weather vane and a speaker. It is reactive to weather patterns, cloud cover, rain and the setting sun.

The village also features a small wooden cottage, built of corrugated metal and old window frames, that has piano key-like floor boards that creak with each step; an outhouse-size structure built of windows with a stethoscope hanging from the ceiling that amplifies the players’ heartbeat when they step inside; and a house with a giant bell-shaped wire dress, covered in lace, that you can stand inside and shake for a cacophonous chorus of hundreds of antique bells and miniature glass bottles.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Diane Danthony sat on the amped rocking chair that hangs from the biggest structure on the property, the River House, and plucked at the old guitar strings on either side of her as each of the chair’s creaky movements played through the radio mounted to the wall on her right. It was her first time visiting and she’s not a musician, but she said the experience was moving. “It’s odd, it’s captivating and it does something that ordinary music just doesn’t.”

Another of the project’s curators, Theo Eliezer, described the project as a “love letter to New Orleans,” honoring a historic city in which part of the daily experience is being “constantly surrounded by odd noises; creaks and clatters and groans, that just kind of exist alongside of us.”

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